getting hold of all the unsold copies and in destroying them, but fortunately he was also stimulated to prepare for publication an authentic edition. The Historia Coelestis Britannica, as he called the book, contained an immense series of observations made both before and during his career at Greenwich, but the most important and permanently valuable part was a catalogue of the places of nearly 3,000 stars.[1]
Flamsteed himself only lived just long enough to finish the second of the three volumes; the third was edited by his assistants Abraham Sharp (1651–1742) and Joseph Crosthwait; and the whole was published in 1725. Four years later still appeared his valuable Star-Atlas, which long remained in common use.
The catalogue was not only three times as extensive as Tycho's, which it virtually succeeded, but was also very much more accurate. It has been estimated[2] that, whereas Tycho's determinations of the positions of the stars were on the average about 1' in error, the corresponding errors in Flamsteed's case were about 10". This quantity is the apparent diameter of a shilling seen from a distance of about 500 yards; so that if two marks were made at opposite points on the edge of the coin, and it were placed at a distance of 500 yards, the two marks might be taken to represent the true direction of an average star and its direction as given in Flamsteed's catalogue. In some cases of course the error might be much greater and in others considerably less.
Flamsteed contributed to astronomy no ideas of first-rate importance; he had not the ingenuity of Picard and of Roemer in devising instrumental improvements, and he took little interest in the theoretical work of Newton;[3] but by unflagging industry and scrupulous care he succeeded in bequeathing to his successors an immense treasure of
- ↑ The apparent number is 2,935, but 12 of these are duplicates.
- ↑ By Bessel (chapter xiii., § 277).
- ↑ The relation between the work of Flamsteed and that of Newton was expressed with more correctness than good taste by the two astronomers themselves, in the course of some quarrel about the lunar theory: "Sir Isaac worked with the ore I had dug." "If he dug the ore, I made the gold ring."
