James Bradley (March 1693 – July 13, 1762) was an English astronomer, Astronomer Royal from 1742. He is best known for discoveri
James Bradley (March 1693 – July 13, 1762) was an English astronomer, Astronomer Royal from 1742. He is best known for discovering the aberration of light while attempting to detect stellar parallax. Bradley was born at Sherborne, near Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, in March 1693. He entered Balliol College, Oxford, on March 15, 1711, and took degrees of and in 1714 and 1717 respectively. His early observations were made at the rectory of Wanstead in Essex, under the tutelage of his uncle, the Rev. James Pound, himself a skilled astronomer, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on November 6, 1718. He took orders on becoming vicar of Bridstow in the following year, and a small sinecure living in Wales was also procured for him by his friend Samuel Molyneux. He resigned his ecclesiastical preferments in 1721, when appointed to the Savilian chair of astronomy at Oxford, while as reader on experimental philosophy from 1729 to 1760, he delivered 79 courses of lectures at the Ashmolean Museum. Bradley worked with Samuel Molyneux until Molyneux's death in 1728 trying to measure the parallax of Gamma Draconis. However, while not finding the expected parallax, they instead found an unexplained motion which shortly after Molyneux's death Bradley realized was caused by the aberration of light. The discovery of the aberration of light which was conclusive evidence for the movement of earth and hence the correctness of Aristarchus and Kepler's theories was announced to the Royal Society in January 1729 (Phil. Trans. xxxv. 637). This aberration also allowed Bradley to accurately estimate the speed of light which had previously been shown to be finite by the work Ole Rømer and others. The observations upon which it was founded were made at Molyneux’s house on Kew Green. Bradley did not announce the supplementary detection of nutation until February 14, 1748 (Phil. Trans. xlv. I), when he had tested its reality by minute observations during
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