Wollaston the polymath

[Zermelo]

I was aimlessly browsing astro links and came across the following, in a list of eyepiece types:

which is obviously quite a weird design, but the inventor's name rang a bell with me - there was a Wollaston who had discovered the elements Palladium and Rhodium, and the name seemed unusual enough for it not to be a co-incidence.

It turns out that William Hyde Wollaston (1766 - 1828) was indeed the common link, and he was quite a polymath whose achievements haven't been recognized as much as those of his more famous contemporaries. As well as optics and astronomy, he made important contributions to the theory and practice of electromagnetism, crystallography, spectroscopy, microscopy, photography, metallurgy, chemical analysis, electrochemistry, botany, mechanics and scientific instrumentation.
His name has been given to a mineral, a lunar crater and various geographical features. Surprisingly, he doesn't seem to have had an asteroid named after him.

He was the son of Francis Wollaston, a clergyman and astronomer, and Althea Hyde, and he was one of their 19 children (!).

[Gfamily]

Nice digging! I do like to find these stories of how we first found out these things

He seems to have been the first person to see that there were dark lines visible in the Sun's spectrum, now known as Fraunhofer lines - probably justifiably as Fraunhofer did properly try to investigate and catalogue them. 

Incidentally, his father the Rev'd Francis made a record that seems to correspond to an 1787 eruption of the recurring nova T Corona Borealis. 

[Zermelo]

20 minutes ago, Gfamily said:

recurring nova T Corona Borealis

small world!

[Zermelo]

22 minutes ago, Gfamily said:

now known as Fraunhofer lines

Any excuse to reference this old favourite:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy