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Melotte.


Ciaran Meier

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I was reading up on Mel111 and came across this article in Wikipedia on Melotte.  I've seen him referenced in some reports here on SGL but didn't know anything about him. 

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Philibert Jacques Melotte (29 January 1880 – 30 March 1961) was a British astronomer whose parents emigrated from Belgium.  In 1908 he discovered a moon of Jupiter, today known as Pasiphaë. It was simply designated "Jupiter VIII" and was not given its present name until 1975. The outer main-belt asteroid 676 Melitta, the only asteroid he discovered,  is named after the Attic form of the Greek Melissa, the bee, but its resemblance to the discoverer's name is not fortuitous. The conspicuous star cluster in the Coma Berenices constellation is commonly designated Mel 111 since it appeared in Melotte's 1915 catalogue  of star clusters but not in Charles Messier's famous catalogue of deep sky objects or in the New General Catalogue since it was not proved to be a true cluster until 1938 by the astronomer R J Trumpler.

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Nice. It's fascinating to put a bit more flesh on the bones of names we've heard, but never really given much thought about. His obituary by the RAS can be found on the link below, and he is mentioned several times in a BAA article, which also includes a photograph of him:

http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/seri/QJRAS/0003//0000048.000.html

http://www.britastro.org/iandi/instruments-origin.htm

James

 

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