Abstract
THE award of the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society to Dr. R. G. Aitken, director of the Lick Observatory, Mount Hamilton, California, was the subject of the presidential address given by Dr. Knox-Shaw, Radcliffe Observer, Oxford, at the annual general meeting of the Society on Feb. 12. The actual presentation of the medal is deferred until May 13, when the medallist is coming to London to deliver the Greorge Darwin lecture; the subject of this has not yet been announced, but it will probably be connected with double stars. Dr. Knox-Shaw began his address by giving a description of the state of double-star astronomy in the middle of the last century; it was taken for granted that the work of the two Herschels and the two Struves had exhausted the mine of possible discoveries, at least in the northern hemisphere, and that it only remained to continue the observation of the known pairs, with a view of obtaining better orbits.
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Gold Medal for Astronomy. Nature 129, 272 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129272a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129272a0