Robert Stawell Ball

Great Astronomers James Bradley annotated Robert Stawell Ball

James Bradley FRS (1693-1762) was an English astronomer and priest who served as Astronomer Royal from 1742. He is best known for two fundamental discoveries in astronomy, the aberration of light (1725-1728), and the nutation of the Earth's axis (1728-1748). These discoveries were called "the most brilliant and useful of the century" by Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, historian of astronomy, mathematical astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory, in his history of astronomy in the 18th century (1821), because "It is to these two discoveries by Bradley that we owe the exactness of modern astronomy.