Captain
William Stephen Jacob
On August
16th 1862 Captain William Stephen Jacob of the East India Company died. He was born in Somerset in England in 1813;
He had a
career with the Indian army and was engaged with a survey of the North West
provinces. He established a private
observatory at Poonah in India in 1842 while here he compiled a catalogue of
244 double stars. In 1847 he discovered that the star Nu Scorpius is in fact a
triple star.
He was
director of the Madras observatory from 1848-1859, where he made observations
of Jupiter trying to work out its mass. He also made observations of some of
the satellites of Saturn. He noticed at
the same time as Lassell in 1852 the transparency of Saturn`s dusky ring. Many
of these observations were done using a 6.3 inch refractor.
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| The Madras Observatory |
In 1855 he
found anomalies with the movements of the star 70 Ophiuchus, he believed there
might be a planet orbiting the star. The
star is a binary system only 16 light years away astronomers today believe there
could be a faint brown dwarf accounting for the discrepancies in the stars
movements.
He retired
from Madras in 1859 due to ill health and returned to England. In 1862 he
returned to India on August 8th 1862 with a 9 inch Cooke refractor, his
health failed him again and sadly he died on August 16th 1862, he had
planned to install this telescope at a mountain observatory at Poonah which was
5,000 feet above sea level.
His Cooke refractor was later sold to Thomas Barneby who used it at his Morton House
observatory near Worcester.
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