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Norman Robert Pogson: an overlooked Nottinghamshire astronomer
By Cherry Armstrong
Few people in the history of astronomy have contributed more but remained as obscure as the British astronomer Norman Robert Pogson.1
Nottinghamshire should be proud to be the birthplace of Norman Robert Pogson, a 19th century astronomer whose achievements went largely unnoticed in his lifetime, since he did much of his work on the other side of the world, in India. Yet, he was the inventor of the Pogson Ratio: the system by which we still note the brightness of stars today. NASA honoured him by naming a crater on the moon The Pogson Crater. His passion was for variable stars – a new phenomenon in his day, visible as telescopes became strong enough to witness the change in the brilliance of specific stars. Though astronomy was his passion, it grew out of an astute mathematical mind.
Eleanor PogsonIt is often a puzzle how brilliant minds can appear in quite ordinary families – but it happens. My great-great-grandfather was born into a family of mill owners in Lenton in 1829 and I have been lucky in that subsequent family members have squirreled away diaries, notebooks and photographs going back through the generations. Our earliest tangible information comes from Norman Pogson’s elder sister, Eleanor, who wrote to her nephew –
The Luke Pogson found drowned at Lenton was our grandfather. I have often heard Father tell what a great man he was but he loved to go out an evening walk, along the Canal banks and smoke a pipe and hear Politics talked over at some house that way then came home all quiet and relate very little !! But that was his practice, and all at peace and comfortable as usual at home. He left one evening and a dark night someone heard a cry of Lost! Lost!! And when the canal was dragged it was poor old Grandpapa, a very worthy man, who when the Luddites were breaking up machines in their mad riots, would not touch his, but protected his place, as such a good Master who would not reduce their wages.
George Owen PogsonLuke was 58 years old when he drowned, so Norman’s father, George Owen, inherited the mills when only 23. He was a tough, down-to-earth, practical man who thought of himself as a good mill owner, like his father before him. Today we would consider the working conditions horrendous, but in George’s day it was accepted, and he prided himself on being able to give work and an income to poor folk who had fallen on hard times. Over the years he improved and modernised the mill as each innovation came about, eventually changing the workings from lace making to the manufacture of silk stockings.
Norman’s mother, Mary Ann Browne, also came from a manufacturing family. Her father, together with John Dent, had founded the well-known luxury glove makers, Dent & Co. She claimed to be related to royalty back in the day, but the family was nevertheless what would have been called nouveaux riche – the new-moneyed class.
It was a great sadness to his parents that Norman, their only living son, had no interest in the business. His sights were on a much larger scale. As a teenager, he journeyed to London, at first earning a meagre salary teaching mathematics. But he soon got in with another Nottinghamshire progeny, John Hind, who was in charge of the privately owned Bishop’s Observatory. John Hind’s parents were also Nottingham mill owners, the first to use the Jacquard Loom.
Norman helped John Hind predict the orbit of the planet Iris, which Hind had discovered the year before and calculated a six-month ephemeris for it. He also calculated an ephemeris for Gourjon’s Comet. He worked fast and accurately, filling ledgers with his minute, neat handwriting. At only 19 years old, he made his first publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical society (1848).
He moved to the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford where he toiled for seven years for small pay and still less encouragement.2 But in his free time he had the use of the observatory’s state-of-the-art equipment and his first discovery was the asteroid 42 Isis, for which he received the Lalande Medal. He also discovered the fiery variable star, Ariadne, in the dark skies between other stars of the Corona Borealis. During this time he produced a catalogue of 164 stars within 6 degrees of the North Pole.
He had married Elizabeth Ambrose, the love of his life and the mother of the first 13 of his 16 children. They named all their daughters after the stars that he discovered. His eldest daughter, Isis, would become his able assistant, a meteorologist in her own right, and one of the first women to be a member of the Royal Astronomical Society. His third son, my great-grandfather, would become a successful architect in colonial India, and had the gift of finding water by dowsing.
Norman Pogson as a young manFrom Oxford, Norman moved to the private observatory at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, owned by the eccentric John Lee. Here he discovered the planet Hestia while his wife produced a similarly named daughter. But Norman was always restless and when the position of Government Astronomer in Madras (Chennai) in India became vacant, he eagerly accepted the assignment.
John Lee was very fond of the family, godfather to Norman’s youngest son, Alfred Lee, and he did not want Norman to go. It may have been a last-ditch attempt to discourage him when he advised Norman that he should leave his three eldest sons in England for their education. It was a shock for Norman and even more so for his poor wife, but he had already committed himself to the job.
The three boys, Everard, aged 11; Ambrose, aged 9; and little six-year-old William went to live with their grandparents, George Owen and Mary Ann, at the Lenton Mills in Nottingham. The family also comprised the two unmarried daughters, Eleanor and her younger sister named Mary Ann like her mother. Mary Ann was a gifted artist and poet in her own right and in her later years would marry Joseph Baxendell, another well-known northern astronomer and meteorologist. George Owen not only cared for his three young grandsons, but also paid for their education at Manchester Grammar School.
Madras ObservatoryNorman’s work in Madras was fraught with difficulties, as he was always at loggerheads with his employers, the Government of Madras. These politicians had little appreciation of astronomy. They wanted Norman to do practical surveying and meteorological work to help with the navigation of their difficult coastline, whereas Norman saw his work as more ephemeral. They were also reluctant to pay Norman for the upkeep of his ever increasing family and it came as a terrible blow when his wife, Elizabeth, died at the age of 40.
Norman had an enormous capacity for work and never seemed to need sleep. Between 1862-87 he produced a Madras Catalogue of Stars comprising over 51,000 observations. The completed work remained unpublished for ten years since he dared not put it in the hands of his employers after a fiasco when his groundbreaking findings at the 1868 total eclipse got lost in the bureaucratic mess of Government House. His Variable Star Atlas, a work done entirely for his own interest, contained 60,000 stars reduced to the epoch 1860. During this time, he mentored Chinthamani Ragoonatha Chary, the first modern Indian astronomer and a good friend.
In1884, the Madras Government finally recognised Norman’s contribution to astronomy by awarding him the Order of Companion of the Indian Empire. By this time, his daughter, Elizabeth Isis, was in charge of all the meteorological stations of southern India. His son, William, was the go-to architect in Madras. Another son, Alfred Lee, served as a construction engineer of the first Madras Harbour.
Norman died quite suddenly of a neglected cancer in 1891, aged 62. A friend wrote:
The evening before the late Mr. Pogson died he sent for me and I went to see him shortly before 8 p.m. I found him seated in an easy chair in the front veranda of the Observatory, perfectly calm and collected and free from pain. He told me that he had sent for me in order to wish me good-bye.
“I shall go to-morrow or the next day,” he said, “and I am ready...”
Shortly afterwards I went away and not many hours later I was standing by the graveside of my revered friend...3
1. https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2007JBAA..117..237R
2. Letter from Pogson to the Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy
3. Family papers
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