Abstract
FRANK ABTHUR BELLAMY, who died suddenly on February 15 at the age of seventy-four years, started his astronomical career in 1881 as an assistant at the Radcliffe Observatory at Oxford, where his two elder brothers had been before him. Eleven years later he was selected by Prof. Pritchard to be his assistant at the University Observatory at Oxford. When H. H. Turner succeeded to the Savilian chair two years later, the share of the Astrographic Catalogue which Pritchard had accepted was in its inception; a suitable telescope had been presented to the Observatory by Warren de la Rue; and to Bellamy fell a large share of the taking of the plates, the measurement of some 400,000 star images, the reduction of the measures, and the preparation of the results for publication. That a piece of work of this magnitude could be carried out in a reasonable time at an observatory with such a meagre staff was mainly due to the ingenious methods of measurement and reduction introduced by Turner, but its completion within the short period of ten years owes much to the enthusiasm and assiduity which Bellamy devoted to it.
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Mr. F. A. Bellamy. Nature 137, 388–389 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137388b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137388b0