Born Sunderland, England, 14 August 1842
Died Sunderland, England, 13 March 1920
Thomas Backhouse, well educated and independently wealthy, devoted his life to the observation and cataloguing of astronomical and meteorological phenomena. His publications (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society; Publications of the West Hendon House Observatory) include a wide variety of topics ranging from the green flash, aurorae, and the zodiacal light to variable stars and novae, meteors and comets, and the structure of the Universe. Backhouse was one of the earliest observers to call attention to the “… Zodiacal Light opposite the Sun” now commonly known as the gegenschein. A similar achievement was his observation of the nebulosity surrounding Merope in the Pleiades, later confirmed by Isaac Roberts in one of his dramatic early photographs of nebulae. Backhouse's Catalogue of 9 ,842 Stars Visible to the Naked Eye(1911) formed the basis for several atlases published for the benefit...
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Anon. (1921). “Thomas William Backhouse.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 81: 254–255.
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Williams, T.R. (2007). Backhouse, Thomas William . In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_92
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