Astronomer, born in Sherborne, Gloucestershire, SWC England, UK. He studied at Oxford, and became professor of astronomy there in 1721. In 1742 he succeeded Edmond Halley as professor of astronomy at Greenwich. He published his discovery of the aberration of light (1729), providing the first observational proof of the Copernican hypothesis. In 1748 he discovered that the inclination of the Earth's axis to the ecliptic is not constant.
James Bradley (March 1693 – July 13, 1762) was an English astronomer, Astronomer Royal from 1742.
Life & work
Bradley was born at Sherborne, near Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, in March 1693. James Pound (himself a skilled astronomer) and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on November 6, 1718.
He took orders on becoming vicar of Bridstow in the following year, and a small sinecure living in Wales was also procured for him by his friend Samuel Molyneux.
His memorable discovery of the aberration of light was announced to the Royal Society in January 1729 (Phil. I), when he had tested its reality by minute observations during an entire revolution (18.6 years) of the moon’s nodes. In 1742, he had been appointed to succeed Edmund Halley as Astronomer Royal; and with an 8-foot quadrant completed for him in 1750 by John Bird, he accumulated at Greenwich in ten years materials of inestimable value for the reform of astronomy. A crown pension of £250 a year was conferred upon him in 1752.
He retired in broken health, nine years later, to the Cotswold village of Chalford in Gloucestershire, where he died at Skiveralls House on 13 July 1762. The publication of his observations was delayed by disputes about their ownership; but they were finally issued by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in two folio volumes (1798, 1805).
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