MDMD(7) JJ Lalande

[Doug Millison]

.213.10 `J J Lalande'  Any biographical details on this
>astronomer?


I have to wonder what Pynchon might make of these two details of Lalande's
life:  "He hid royalist friends in the Paris Observatory during the French
Revolution and made a balloon ascent at age 67."

Also of marginal interest, in light of the references to aliens in M&D, the
star (a red dwarf) named for Lalande is orbited by two or three
Jupiter-class planets.

from http://www.skypub.com/whatsup/lalande.html:

Joseph-Jérôme de Lalande (1732-1807) became director of Paris Observatory
in 1795 and
produced a catalog of nearly 50,000 star positions. Today his catalog is
remembered mainly for the name it bequeathed to a lone 7th-magnitude star
in Ursa Major.

Lalande 21185 can be seen on spring evenings glowing like a dim ember at
magnitude 7.5 in the hind feet of Ursa Major. It is only 8.3 light-years
away, a little closer than Sirius but 4,000 times fainter. With an absolute
visual magnitude of 10.5 it emits only 1/180 the light of the Sun.

Although dim and obscure, Lalande 21185 has a history stretching back two
centuries. It takes its name from French astronomer Joseph-Jérôme
Lefrançais de Lalande, who included it in a star catalog that has since
fallen into obscurity. A friend of Charles Messier and the author of
several astronomy textbooks, Lalande was well known in his time not only
for his writings but also for his love of publicity. Indeed, his activities
extended well beyond astronomy. On one occasion, in order to convince the
public not to fear spiders, he swallowed several of the eight-legged
creatures. He hid royalist friends in the Paris Observatory during the
French Revolution and made a balloon ascent at age 67.

To astronomers today Lalande is most infamous for a discovery he failed to
make. In 1795, while
working on his star catalog, either he or an assistant twice recorded
Neptune -- but mistook it for a star, even though the planet's position on
the second night differed from that on the first. This oversight was all
the more remarkable in light of William Herschel's acclaimed discovery of
the new planet Uranus 14 years earlier. Neptune would go unfound for
another 51 years.

Lalande's star catalog, Histoire Céleste Française, was published in 1801.
It contained nearly 50,000 stars. There seemed nothing special about number
21185. It was just another faint star in a catalog full of them, and for
decades it attracted no attention.

--Ken Croswell is author of The Alchemy of the Heavens: Searching for
Meaning in the Milky Way, a new popular-level book on our galaxy.

from another web site, http://trfn.clpgh.org/orgs/aaap/lalande.html:

Lalande 21185 has been discovered to have planets buzzing around it by
George D. Gatewood Ph.D,
director of the University of Pittsburgh's Allegheny Observatory. This
discovery was announced at 188th meeting of the American Astronomical
Society in Madison Wisconsin. Using 60 years of
photographic data and 9 years of data from the Multichannel Astrometric
Photometer(MAP) at least 2 Jupiter sized, and possibly a third planet is
orbiting the red dwarf star Lalande 21185. The most interesting thing about
this story is that most of the data is collected by amateur astronomers!
The current observing staff at the Allegheny Observatory is made up
exclusively of amateurs and many of them are AAAP members.

D O U G  M I L L I S O N ||||||||||||| millison at online-journalist.com
  Today (4 Sep 97) in history:  1682. English astronomer
  Edmund Halley saw the comet that would be named after him.