One Hundred Years Ago

[Bill Barton]

June 8 2018 is the centenary of the discovery of nova Aquilæ 1918. It was first seen from the U.K. by Alice Grace Cook (1877-1958), an amateur astronomer who lived in Stowmarket, Suffolk at around 22:30 BST on the evening of June 8.

 

Our Sun has a constant output of light and heat, however some other stars change with time. An extreme example of variable stars are novæ which are possibly too faint to be observed even with large telescopes from the Earth, but flare up in a couple of days to be visible even to the naked eye and this is what happened one hundred years ago. Grace Cook was just lucky enough to be one of the first people to see it. This object turned out to the be brightest of its type in the whole of the 20th century and was visible to the naked eye for at least two months. It briefly outshone all the other stars in the constellation Aquila and was nearly bright as the Dog Star, Sirius. Novæ are not to be confused with supernovæ.

 

Novæ only occur infrequently, so they are known by the year they are discovered and the constellation they are seen in, so in this case the year was 1918 and the constellation was Aquila (the eagle).

 

A study published in 2000 showed that Nova Aquilæ is a double star. One component is 1.2 times the size of our Sun and the other is only 0.2 times the size of our Sun. They orbit each other in around 3 hours and 20 minutes.

 

Later reports showed that the initial discovery had been made from India by George Noel Bower (1885-1951), an Englishman working in the Indian Civil Service as a customs officer in Madras (now Chennai), who saw it some five hours earlier.

 

Grace Cook was in the group of women who were the fist to be admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society (the UK national professional astronomical group). This had happened two years earlier in January 1916.

 

Cook’s real interest in astronomy was observing shooting stars or meteors and she observed them for over twenty years from 1911 to the mid 1930’s. She also observed the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights.

 

Grace Cook became sufficiently famous in astronomy that in 1920 she was given a grant of $500US by the Harvard College Observatory in America.

[JohnSadlerAstro]

36 minutes ago, Bill Barton said:

Grace Cook became sufficiently famous in astronomy that in 1920 she was given a grant of $500US by the Harvard College Observatory in America.

I wonder if she bought a new 80mm refractor with that?

John 

[Mark at Beaufort]

Bill thanks for that piece of Astro history. Certainly something I was not aware of. I know you joined last December but officially welcome to SGL.

[Bill Barton]

At least some of the money was used to buy life membership of the British Astronomical Association, books, telescope accessories and a Corona typewriter. 

Between 1913 and 1920 Grace Cook had use of a BAA loan instrument, the 5” aperture 7’ 10” focal length ‘Pennington Refractor’. She also had a 6” aperture reflector given to her by the touring astronomical lecturer Joseph Hardcastle and a 2” aperture Ottway Refractor.

[JohnSadlerAstro]

Obviously $500 was worth an awful lot more than it is now...

Something that's always fascinated me is how our perception of telescopes, (particularly refractors) has changed over the years. It is almost unheard of to have an f/19 telescope, (even in cats), yet back then, basically all refractors were of those proportions. Modern refractors (and telescopes in general) have swung towards fast f/ratios.

Is this because mulit-element achromats weren't easy to make back then?

John

[Ags]

Maybe it was because the eyepieces available at that time weren't awesome.

[Alan White]

Nice posting Bill, makes interesting reading and a reason to research Grace Cook.

http://www.oasi.org.uk/History/Cook/Cook.php

The above contains a scan of an article with an image of Grace in her observatory, looks like what some of us have these days.

 

[goodricke1]

There certainly seems to be no shortage of discoverers... here's another one claiming the Nova was first seen on June 7th by a Polish anatomy prof -

http://astrocoins.mrcollector.eu/index.php/english-menu-1/deep-sky/nova-supernova/362-nova-aquilae-1918