Robert Thorburn Ayton Innes (November 10, 1861 Edinburgh – March 13, 1933) was a Scottish-South African astronomer best known for discovering Proxima Centauri in 1915, and numerous binary stars. He was also the first astronomer to have seen the Great January Comet of 1910, on January 12. He was the founding director of a meteorological station, which he converted to an astronomical observatory and renamed to Union Observatory. He was the first Un...
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Robert Thorburn Ayton Innes (November 10, 1861 Edinburgh – March 13, 1933) was a Scottish-South African astronomer best known for discovering Proxima Centauri in 1915, and numerous binary stars. He was also the first astronomer to have seen the Great January Comet of 1910, on January 12. He was the founding director of a meteorological station, which he converted to an astronomical observatory and renamed to Union Observatory. He was the first Union Astronomer.
A self-taught astronomer, he went to Australia at an early age and made his living as a wine merchant in Sydney, where, using a small telescope, he discovered several double stars new to astronomy. He also published some papers on perturbations in Mars' and Venus' orbits.
Despite having had no formal training in astronomy, he was invited to the Cape by Sir David Gill in 1894 and appointed to the Cape observatory in 1896. In 1903 he took up the position of Director of the new Meteorological Observatory in Johannesburg. He...
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