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astrolibrarian.bsky.social
RAS Library and Archives
@astrolibrarian.bsky.social
1.2K followers 170 following 13 posts
We look after the astronomy and geophysics collections in the library and archive of the Royal Astronomical Society.
https://ras.ac.uk/library
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astrolibrarian.bsky.social
Good to finally see the plaque dedicated to pioneering astronomers Willam and Margaret Huggins in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral this evening. Installed in 1917.

There aren't many other women commemorated in the 500 or so monuments here, but this post reveals more: lookup.london/women-of-st-....
White marble depicting William Huggins and Margaret Lindsay Huggins.
August 8, 2025 at 7:21 PM
astrolibrarian.bsky.social
Chandrasekhar’s paper on was read at a meeting of @royalastrosoc.bsky.social on 11 January 1935. Chandrasekhar showed that as the mass of a white dwarf reaches the maximum mass, the star’s radius becomes zero and the star shrinks to nothing – the Chandrasekhar Limit. academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...
A graph from S. Chandrasekhar's paper 'The highly collapsed configurations of a stellar mass' showing the relationship between the mass of a star and the radius of a star. The graph is labelled: "Figure 2 - the Full line curve represents the exact (mass-radius)-reation for the highly collapsed configurations. This curve tends asymptotically to the ---- curve as at M -> o."
January 9, 2025 at 5:16 PM
astrolibrarian.bsky.social
Nilanjan P. Choudhury will be one of the speakers at the January A&G Highlights Meeting. His play about S. Chandrasekhar and Arthur Eddington has inspired archivist Kate Bond to curate a display relating to the 90th anniversary of the clash between the two astronomers ras.ac.uk/events-and-m...
The buff-coloured cover of a manuscript inscribed with the name S. Chandrasekhar and the title 'Tabulation of ϕ and the Auxiliary-functions (see M.N. 95.3 1935)'. This manuscript was deposited in the Royal Astronomical Society library and archive by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. The tables accompanied Chandrasekhar’s paper “The Highly Collapsed Configurations of a Stellar Mass (Second Paper)” which was published in Volume 95, Number 3, of Monthly Notices of the RAS, in January 1935. The paper was read at a meeting of the Society on 11th January 1935.
January 9, 2025 at 4:52 PM
astrolibrarian.bsky.social
Thanks to Kate for hosting our behind the scenes tour of Burlington House! Here she is showing a scrapbook about the 1874 Transit of Venus expedition to Kerguelen island to our visitors.
An archivist is turning the pages of a scrapbook/photograph album which supported on a book rest on a table in a library. She is surrounded by visitors looking at the album. As always, the overly large shades of the table lamps of the RAS library are in the foreground.
November 29, 2024 at 7:32 PM
astrolibrarian.bsky.social
Our Archivist Kate Bond kicks off our anniversary tour of @royalastrosoc.bsky.social
A woman standing at a lectern with a projector screen behind her displaying the original 1874 layout proposed by the architects for the RAS lecture theatre in New Burlington House
November 29, 2024 at 6:11 PM
astrolibrarian.bsky.social
To accompany Professor Ian Crawford's lecture on the Fermi Paradox, we've put together a display of 17th- and 18th-century speculations about life on the Moon, including lunar maps by Riccioli, Grimaldi and Hevelius.
Giovanni Battista Riccioli was an astronomer and Jesuit priest. This book contains one of the most accurate maps of the Moon available during the mid-seventeenth century, drawn by fellow Jesuit F. M. Grimaldi. In contrast to his contemporary, Johannes Hevelius, who believed that the Moon was inhabited, this map shows Riccioli’s position on the possibility of life on the Moon: above the map he proclaims that ‘Neither do men dwell on the Moon, nor do souls migrate to the Moon’. Riccioli’s system of naming lunar features after famous astronomers became widely adopted, and many of the names remain in use today.
November 19, 2024 at 6:07 PM