Talk:Francis Baily
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, now in the public domain. |
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page. | ||
| Start | This article has been rated as Start-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ] | ||
 |
This article is supported by the Science and academia work group. | ||
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Astronomy, which collaborates on articles related to astronomy. | |
| ??? | This article has not yet received a rating on the assessment scale. [FAQ] | |
|
Please rate this article, and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article. |
||
[edit] Baily's Blunder?
"Leo Minor has one unusual feature, the fact that the constellation has no star labelled Alpha (α), although its second-brightest star is labelled Beta (β). This is due to an error by the 19th-century English astronomer Francis Baily, who assigned Greek letters to Leo Minor's stars. In doing so, he overlooked 46 LMi, which should be Alpha."
Ian Ridpath, Astronomy (Eyewitness Companions), p. 176
" Curiously, Leo Minor has no star labelled Alpha, although there is a Beta Leonis Minoris. This seems to have resulted from an oversight on the part of the 19th-century English astronomer Francis Baily. Hevelius did not label the stars in any of his newly formed constellations, so 150 years later Baily did it for him. In his British Association Catalogue of 1845, Baily assigned the letter Beta to the second-brightest star in Leo Minor, but left the brightest star (46 Leonis Minoris) unlettered by mistake."
Ian Ridpath's Star Tales
