James Ferguson

Who was James Ferguson?

James Ferguson was an American astronomer and engineer born in Scotland who made the first discovery of an asteroid from North America. Starting in 1847, he worked at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, DC.

The asteroid 1745 Ferguson, discovered from the same observatory, was later named in his honour.

In 1850, he "lost" a star that he had been observing, which Lt. Matthew Maury, the superintended of the Observatory, claimed was evidence for a 9th planet. In 1878, however, CHF Peters, director of the Hamilton College Observatory in New York, showed that the star had not in fact vanished, and that the previous results had been due to human error.