Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer - Publications

Astronomer, born in Rugby, Warwickshire, C England, UK. As a clerk in the War Office (1857–75) he detected and named helium in the Sun's chromosphere (1868), a generation before William Ramsay found it on Earth. He worked in the government science and art department (1875–90), started and edited Nature (1869–1920), and was professor of astronomical physics at the Royal College of Science (1908–13). He was knighted in 1897.

Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer or Norman Lockyer (May 17, 1836 – August 16, 1920) was an English scientist and astronomer.

Lockyer was born at Rugby in Warwickshire. A keen amateur astronomer with a particular interest in the sun, Lockyer eventually became director of the solar physics observatory in Kensington London. Lockyer identified a yellow strip in the spectrum of the sun that conventional scientific opinion of the time held as a known element under extraordinary circumstances.

To facilitate the transmission of ideas between scientific disiplines, Lockyer established the general science journal Nature in 1869.

After his retirement in 1911, Lockyer established an observatory near his home in Salcombe Regis, Devon. Originally known as the Hill Observatory, the site was renamed the Norman Lockyer Observatory after his death. For a time the observatory was a part of the University of Exeter, but is now owned by the East Devon District Council, and run by the Norman Lockyer Observatory Society.

Lockyer crater on the Moon and Lockyer crater on Mars are named after him.

Lockyer died at his home in Salcombe Regis in 1920.

Publications

Elementary Lessons in Astronomy (1868-94) Questions on Astronomy (1870) Contributions to Solar Physics (1873) Star-Gazing, Past and Present (1877) Studies in Spectral Analysis (1878) Report to the Committee on Solar Physics on the Basic Lines Common to Spots and Prominences (1880) The Movements of the Earth (1887) The Chemistry of the Sun (1887) The Meteorite Hypothesis (1890) The Dawn of Astronomy (1894) The Sun's Place in Nature (1897) Recent and Coming Eclipses (1900) Inorganic Evolution as Studied by Spectrum Analysis (1900) The Influence of Brain Power in History (1903) Stonehenge and Other British Stone Monuments Astronomically Considered (1906;