Nevil Maskelyne

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Nevil Maskelyne

Nevil Maskelyne , 1732-1811, English astronomer. Maskelyne received his education at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Appointed astronomer royal at the Royal Observatory in 1765, he held this post for 46 years. He introduced the determination of longitude by lunar distances into English navigation, calculated these distances annually, and had them and other pertinent observations published in the Nautical Almanac, the first of which was available in 1766. At Schiehallion, a mountain in Scotland, he devised a method of measuring the mean density of the earth by using a pendulum.

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Maskelyne, Nevil

A Dictionary of Astronomy | 1997 | Â© A Dictionary of Astronomy 1997, originally published by Oxford University Press 1997. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

Maskelyne, Nevil (1732–1811)Englishastronomer. On a voyage to St Helena in 1761 he successfully tested tables of the Moon's position compiled by the German astronomer Johan Tobias Mayer (1723–62) for finding longitude at sea. When in 1765 he became the fifth Astronomer Royal, Maskelyne included tables of lunar positions for navigation in The Nautical Almanac, which he founded in 1766. He observed the 1769 transit of Venus and from it calculated the Sun's distance to an accuracy of 1%. In 1774 he measured the deflection of a plumbline near the Scottish mountain Schiehallion, from which he calculated the Earth's average density to be 4.7g/cm³, the first good approximation to the true value (5.52g/cm³).

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