Edward James Stone

Who was Edward James Stone?

Edward James Stone was an English astronomer.

He was born in Notting Hill, London to Edward and Sarah Stone. Educated at the City of London School, he obtained a studentship at King's College London, and in 1856 a scholarship at Queens' College, Cambridge where he graduated as fifth wrangler in 1859, and was immediately elected fellow of his college.

The following year he succeeded the Rev. Robert Main as chief assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, and at once undertook the fundamental task of improving astronomical constants. The most important of these, the sun's mean parallax, was at that time subject to considerable uncertainty. He obtained a value for the solar parallax by observations of Mars in 1860 and 1862. He later refined his estimate by examining observations of the transit of Venus of 1769. He also studied the lunar parallax, and determined the mass of the Moon, and obtained a value for the constant of nutation. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1868.

He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1869, and on the resignation of Sir Thomas Maclear in 1870 he was appointed Her Majesty's astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope.