The Royal Astronomical Society ( RAS ) is a learned society and charity that encourages and promotes the study of astronomy , solar-system science , geophysics and closely related branches of science. Its headquarters are in Burlington House , on Piccadilly in London . The society has over 4,000 members, known as fellows, most of whom are professional researchers or postgraduate students. Around a quarter of Fellows live outside the UK.
61-614: The Eddington Medal is awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society for investigations of outstanding merit in theoretical astrophysics . It is named after Sir Arthur Eddington . First awarded in 1953, the frequency of the prize has varied over the years, at times being every one, two or three years. Since 2013 it has been awarded annually. Source is unless otherwise noted. Royal Astronomical Society The society holds monthly scientific meetings in London, and
122-529: A trade magazine for members, Astronomy & Geophysics . The history of journals published by the RAS (with abbreviations used by the Astrophysics Data System ) is: Full members of the RAS are styled Fellows, and may use the post-nominal letters FRAS . Fellowship is open to anyone over the age of 18 who is considered acceptable to the society. As a result of the society's foundation in
183-469: A list of the references given at the end of the article is easily extracted. For scanned articles, reference extraction relies on OCR. The reference database can then be "inverted" to list the citations for each paper in the database. Citation lists have been used in the past to identify popular articles missing from the database; mostly these were from before 1975 and have now been added to the system. The database now contains over fifteen million articles. In
244-441: A rare term which is a synonym of a much more common term (such as ' dateline ' rather than ' date ') can be searched for specifically. The search engine allows selection logic both within fields and between fields. Search terms in each field can be combined with OR, AND, simple logic or Boolean logic , and the user can specify which fields must be matched in the search results. This allows complex searches to be built; for example,
305-580: A record four times each. Baily's eight years in the role are a record (Airy served for seven). Since 1876 no one has served for more than two years in total. The current president is Mike Lockwood, who began his term in May 2024 and will serve for two years. The highest award of the Royal Astronomical Society is its Gold Medal , which can be awarded for any purpose but most frequently recognises extraordinary lifetime achievement. Among
366-511: A system that was written specifically for the ADS, allowing for extensive customization for astronomical needs that would not have been possible with general purpose database software. The scripts are designed to be as platform independent as possible, given the need to facilitate mirroring on different systems around the world, although the growing use of Linux as the operating system of choice within astronomy has led to increasing optimization of
427-444: A time before there were many professional astronomers, no formal qualifications are required. However, around three quarters of fellows are professional astronomers or geophysicists . Most of the other fellows are postgraduate students studying for a PhD in those fields, but there are also advanced amateur astronomers , historians of science who specialise in those disciplines, and other related professionals. The society acts as
488-460: A wider spread of online editions of journal publications, abstracts would start to instead be loaded into ADS directly. Papers are indexed within the database by their bibliographic record which contains the details of the journal they were published in, and various associated metadata , such as author lists, references and citations . Originally this data was stored in ASCII format but eventually
549-506: Is a digital library portal for researchers on astronomy and physics , operated for NASA by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory . ADS maintains three bibliographic collections containing over 15 million records, including all arXiv e-prints. Abstracts and full-text of major astronomy and physics publications are indexed and searchable through the portal. Johann Friedrich Weidler published
610-625: Is almost universally used as a research tool among astronomers, and there are several studies that have estimated quantitatively how much more efficient ADS has made astronomy; one estimated that ADS increased the efficiency of astronomical research by 333 full-time equivalent research years per year, and another found that in 2002 its effect was equivalent to 736 full-time researchers, or all the astronomical research done in France. ADS has allowed literature searches that would previously have taken days or weeks to carry out to be completed in seconds, and it
671-512: Is by far the most advanced and its use accounts for about 85% of the total ADS usage. Articles are assigned to the different databases according to the subject rather than the journal they are published in, so that articles from any one journal might appear in all three subject databases. The separation of the databases allows searching in each discipline to be tailored, so that words can automatically be given different weight functions in different database searches, depending on how common they are in
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#1732772327230732-414: Is converted to " Hercules ", but h er is ignored. Once search terms have been preprocessed, the database is queried with the revised search term, as well as synonyms for it. As well as simple synonym replacement such as searching for both plural and singular forms, ADS also searches for a large number of specifically astronomical synonyms. For example, spectrograph and spectroscope have basically
793-535: Is estimated at between 4,000 and US$ 5,000 million, so the value of ADS to astronomy would be about 200–250 million USD annually. Its operating budget is a small fraction of this amount. The great importance of ADS to astronomers has been recognized by the United Nations , the General Assembly of which has commended ADS on its work and success, particularly noting its importance to astronomers in
854-406: Is estimated that ADS has increased the readership and use of the astronomical literature by a factor of about three since its inception. In monetary terms, this increase in efficiency represents a considerable amount. There are about 12,000 active astronomical researchers worldwide, so ADS is the equivalent of about 5% of the working population of astronomers. The global astronomical research budget
915-723: Is one of ADS's most powerful tools. The system uses data from the SIMBAD , the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database , the International Astronomical Union Circulars and the Lunar and Planetary Institute to identify papers referring to a given object, and can also search by object position, listing papers which concern objects within a 10 arcminute radius of a given Right Ascension and Declination . These databases combine
976-716: Is second only to that of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh in the UK. The RAS library is a major resource not just for the society but also the wider community of astronomers, geophysicists, and historians. The society promotes astronomy to members of the general public through its outreach pages for students, teachers, the public and media researchers. The RAS has an advisory role in relation to UK public examinations , such as GCSEs and A Levels . The RAS sponsors topical groups, many of them in interdisciplinary areas where
1037-407: Is simplified and a user input of M45, M 45 or M-45 all result in the same query being executed; similarly, NGC designations and common search terms such as Shoemaker Levy and T Tauri are stripped of spaces. Unimportant words such as AT, OR and TO are stripped out, although in some cases case sensitivity is maintained, so that while a nd is ignored, A nd is converted to " Andromeda ", and H er
1098-450: Is used almost universally by astronomers, ADS can reveal much about how astronomical research is distributed around the world. Most users access the system from institutes of higher education, whose IP address can easily be used to determine the user's geographical location. Studies reveal that the highest per-capita users of ADS are France and Netherlands-based astronomers, and while more developed countries (measured by GDP per capita ) use
1159-714: The Harold Jeffreys Lectureship in geophysics , the George Darwin Lectureship in astronomy , and the Gerald Whitrow Lectureship in cosmology . Each year, the society grants a handful of free memberships for life (termed honorary fellowship) to prominent researchers resident outside the UK. The society occupies premises at Burlington House , London, where a library and meeting rooms are available to fellows and other interested parties. The society represents
1220-531: The professional body for astronomers and geophysicists in the UK and fellows may apply for the Science Council's Chartered Scientist status through the society. The fellowship passed 3,000 in 2003. In 2009 an initiative was launched for those with an interest in astronomy and geophysics but without professional qualifications or specialist knowledge in the subject. Such people may join the Friends of
1281-399: The ADS bibliographic record. The ADS service is distributed worldwide with twelve mirror sites in twelve countries and with the database synchronized by weekly updates using rsync , a mirroring utility which allows updates to only the portions of the database which have changed. All updates are triggered centrally, but they initiate scripts at the mirror sites which "pull" updated data from
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#17327723272301342-675: The RAS, which offers popular talks, visits and social events. The Society organises an extensive programme of meetings: The biggest RAS meeting each year is the National Astronomy Meeting , a major conference of professional astronomers. It is held over 4–5 days each spring or early summer, usually at a university campus in the United Kingdom. Hundreds of astronomers attend each year. More frequent smaller 'highlight' meetings feature lectures about research topics in astronomy and geophysics, often given by winners of
1403-500: The Royal Astronomical Society in 1831 on receiving a Royal Charter from William IV . In 1846 the RAS absorbed the Spitalfields Mathematical Society , which had been founded in 1717 but was suffering from a decline in membership and dwindling finances. The nineteen remaining members of the mathematical society were given free lifetime membership of the RAS; in exchange, their society's extensive library
1464-836: The UK government on astronomy education. The society recognises achievement in astronomy and geophysics by issuing annual awards and prizes, with its highest award being the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society . The RAS is the UK adhering organisation to the International Astronomical Union and a member of the UK Science Council . The society was founded in 1820 as the Astronomical Society of London to support astronomical research. At that time, most members were ' gentleman astronomers ' rather than professionals. It became
1525-400: The United Kingdom, and Ukraine. ADS currently (2005) receives abstracts or tables of contents from almost two hundred journal sources. The service may receive data referring to the same article from multiple sources, and creates one bibliographic reference based on the most accurate data from each source. The common use of TeX and LaTeX by almost all scientific journals greatly facilitates
1586-480: The United Kingdom, often in collaboration with other scientific societies and universities. The Royal Astronomical Society has a more comprehensive collection of books and journals in astronomy and geophysics than the libraries of most universities and research institutions. The library receives some 300 current periodicals in astronomy and geophysics and contains more than 10,000 books from popular level to conference proceedings. Its collection of astronomical rare books
1647-477: The annual National Astronomy Meeting at varying locations in the British Isles . The RAS publishes the scientific journals Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , Geophysical Journal International and RAS Techniques and Instruments , along with the trade magazine Astronomy & Geophysics . The RAS maintains an astronomy research library , engages in public outreach and advises
1708-405: The article. In this way, an ADS user can determine which papers are of most interest to astronomers who are interested in the subject of a given paper. Also returned are links to the SIMBAD and/or NASA Extragalactic Database object name databases, via which a user can quickly find out basic observational data about the objects analyzed in a paper, and find further papers on those objects. ADS
1769-600: The cases of the major journals of astronomy ( Astrophysical Journal , Astronomical Journal , Astronomy and Astrophysics , Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ), coverage is complete, with all issues indexed from number 1 to the present. These journals account for about two-thirds of the papers in the database, with
1830-640: The developing world, in reports of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space . A 2002 report by a visiting committee to the Center for Astrophysics, meanwhile, said that the service had "revolutionized the use of the astronomical literature", and was "probably the most valuable single contribution to astronomy research that the CfA has made in its lifetime". Because it
1891-429: The final search results. The system indexes author names by surname and initials, and accounts for the possible variations in spelling of names using a list of variations. This is common in the case of names including accents such as umlauts and transliterations from Arabic or Cyrillic script . An example of an entry in the author synonym list is: The capability to search for papers on specific astronomical objects
Eddington Medal - Misplaced Pages Continue
1952-518: The first comprehensive history of astronomy in 1741 and the first astronomical bibliography in 1755. This was an effort to archive and classify earlier astronomical knowledge and works. This effort was continued by Jérôme de La Lande who published his Bibliographie astronomique in 1803, a work that covered the period from 480 BCE to the year of publication. The Bibliographie générale de l’astronomie, Volume I and Volume II , published by J.C. Houzeau and A. Lancaster, followed in 1882 until 1889. As
2013-468: The group is jointly sponsored by another learned society or professional body: The first person to hold the title of President of the Royal Astronomical Society was William Herschel , though he never chaired a meeting, and since then the post has been held by many distinguished astronomers. The post has generally had a term of office of two years, but some holders resigned after one year e.g. due to poor health. Francis Baily and George Airy were elected
2074-408: The incorporation of bibliographic data into the system in a standardized format, and importing HTML -coded web-based articles is also simple. ADS utilizes Python and Perl scripts for importing, processing and standardizing bibliographic data. The apparently mundane task of converting author names into a standard Surname , Initial format is actually one of the more difficult to automate, due to
2135-521: The interests of astronomy and geophysics to UK national and regional, and European government and related bodies, and maintains a press office, through which it keeps the media and the public at large informed of developments in these sciences. The society allocates grants to worthy causes in astronomy and geophysics, and assists in the management of the Paneth Trust . Astrophysics Data System The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System ( ADS )
2196-759: The limitations of this encouraged the database maintainers to migrate all records to an XML (Extensible Markup Language) format in 2000. Bibliographic records are now stored as an XML element with sub-elements for the various metadata. Scanned articles are stored in TIFF format at both medium and high resolution . The TIFF files are converted on demand into GIF files, for on-screen viewing, and PDF or PostScript files for printing. The generated files are then cached to eliminate needlessly frequent regenerations for popular articles. As of 2000, ADS contained 250 GB of scans, which consisted of 1,128,955 article pages comprising 138,789 articles. By 2005 this had grown to 650 GB and
2257-415: The main ADS servers. At first, the journal articles available via ADS were exclusively scanned bitmaps created from the paper journals and the abstracts created using optical character recognition software. Some of these scanned articles up to around 1995 are available for free by agreement with the journal publishers, with some dating from as far back as the early 19th century. Eventually, because of
2318-526: The major activities of the RAS is publishing refereed journals. It publishes three primary research journals: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society for topics in astronomy; Geophysical Journal International for topics in geophysics (in association with the Deutsche Geophysikalische Gesellschaft ); and RAS Techniques & Instruments for research methods in those disciplines. The society also publishes
2379-623: The many catalogue designations an object might have, so that a search for the Pleiades will also find papers which list the famous open cluster in Taurus under any of its other catalog designations or popular names, such as M45, the Seven Sisters or Melotte 22. The search engine first filters search terms in several ways. An M followed by a space or hyphen has the space or hyphen removed, so that searching for Messier catalogue objects
2440-485: The most relevant papers. The database can be queried for author names, astronomical object names, title words, and words in the abstract text, and results can be filtered according to a number of criteria. It works by first gathering synonyms and simplifying search terms as described above, and then generating an "inverted file", which is a list of all the documents matching each search term. The user-selected logic and filters are then applied to this inverted list to generate
2501-680: The number of astronomers and astronomical publications grew, bibliographical efforts became institutional tasks, first at the Observatoire Royal de Belgique , where the Bibliography of Astronomy was published from 1881 to 1898, and then at the Astronomischer Rechen-Institut in Heidelberg, where the yearly Astronomischer Jahresbericht was published from 1899 to 1968. After 1968, this was replaced by
Eddington Medal - Misplaced Pages Continue
2562-777: The recipients best known to the general public are Albert Einstein in 1926, and Stephen Hawking in 1985. Other awards are for particular topics in astronomy or geophysics research, which include the Eddington Medal , the Herschel Medal , the Chapman Medal and the Price Medal . Beyond research, there are specific awards for school teaching (Patrick Moore Medal), public outreach (Annie Maunder Medal), instrumentation ( Jackson-Gwilt Medal ) and history of science (Agnes Mary Clerke Medal). Lectureships include
2623-435: The relevant field. Data in the preprint archive is updated daily from arXiv which is the dominant repository of physics and astronomy preprints. The advent of preprint servers has, like ADS, had a significant impact on the rate of astronomical research, as papers are often made available from preprint servers weeks or months before they are published in the journals. The incorporation of preprints from arXiv into ADS means that
2684-638: The rest consisting of papers published in over 100 other journals from around the world, as well as in conference proceedings. While the database contains the complete contents of all the major journals and many minor ones as well, its coverage of references and citations is much less complete. References in and citations of articles in the major journals are fairly complete, but references such as "private communication", "in press" or "in preparation" cannot be matched, and author errors in reference listings also introduce potential errors. Astronomical papers may cite and be cited by articles in journals which fall outside
2745-498: The same day as each highlight meeting. These are aimed at professional scientists in a particular research field, and allow several speakers to present new results or reviews of scientific fields. Usually two discussion meetings on different topics (one in astronomy and one in geophysics) take place simultaneously at different locations within Burlington House, prior to the day's highlight meeting. They are free for members of
2806-617: The same meaning, and in an astronomical context metallicity and abundance are also synonymous. ADS's synonym list was created manually, by grouping the list of words in the database according to similar meanings. As well as English language synonyms, ADS also searches for English translations of foreign search terms and vice versa, so that a search for the French word soleil retrieves references to Sun , and papers in languages other than English can be returned by English search terms. Synonym replacement can be disabled if required, so that
2867-441: The scope of ADS, such as chemistry , mathematics or biology journals. Since its inception, the ADS has developed a highly complex search engine to query the abstract and object databases . The search engine is tailor-made for searching astronomical abstracts, and the engine and its user interface assume that the user is well-versed in astronomy and able to interpret search results which are designed to return more than just
2928-616: The scripts for installation on that platform. The main ADS server is located at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts , and is a dual 64-bit X86 Intel server with two quad-core 3.0 GHz CPUs and 32 GB of RAM , running the CentOS 5.4 Linux distribution. As of 2022, there are mirrors located in China, Chile, France, Germany, Japan, Russia,
2989-433: The search engine can return the most current research available, with the caveat that preprints may not have been peer-reviewed or proofread to the required standard for publication in the main journals. The database of ADS links preprints with subsequently published articles wherever possible, so that citation and reference searches will return links to the journal article where the preprint was cited. The software runs on
3050-484: The search. Although it was conceived as a means of accessing abstracts and papers, ADS provides a substantial amount of ancillary information along with search results. For each abstract returned, links are provided to other papers in the database which are referenced, and which cite the paper, and a link is provided to a preprint, where one exists. The system also generates a link to "also-read" articles – that is, those which have been most commonly accessed by those reading
3111-566: The society's awards . They are normally held in Burlington House in London on the afternoon of the second Friday of each month from October to May. The talks are intended to be accessible to a broad audience of astronomers and geophysicists, and are free for anyone to attend (not just members of the society). Formal reports of the meetings are published in The Observatory magazine. Specialist discussion meetings are held on
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#17327723272303172-552: The society, but charge a small entry fee for non-members. The RAS holds a regular programme of public lectures aimed at a general, non-specialist, audience. These are mostly held on Tuesdays once a month, with the same talk given twice: once at lunchtime and once in the early evening. The venues have varied, but are usually in Burlington House or another nearby location in central London. The lectures are free, though some popular sessions require booking in advance. The society occasionally hosts or sponsors meetings in other parts of
3233-544: The system more than less developed countries; the relationship between GDP per capita and ADS use is not linear. The range of ADS usage per capita far exceeds the range of GDP per capita, and basic research carried out in a country, as measured by ADS usage, has been found to be proportional to the square of the country's GDP divided by its population. Statistics also imply that there are about three times as many astronomers in countries of European culture as in countries of Asian cultures , perhaps suggesting cultural differences in
3294-555: The user could search for papers concerning NGC 6543 OR NGC 7009 , with the paper titles containing (radius OR velocity) AND NOT (abundance OR temperature). Search results can be filtered according to a number of criteria, including specifying a range of years such as "1945 to 1975", "2000 to the present day" or "before 1900", and what type of journal the article appears in [–] non-peer-reviewed articles such as conference proceedings. These can be excluded or specifically searched for, or specific journals can be included in or excluded from
3355-408: The wide variety of naming conventions around the world and the possibility that a given name such as Davis could be a first name , middle name or surname. The accurate conversion of names requires a detailed knowledge of the names of authors active in astronomy, and ADS maintains an extensive database of author names, which is also used in searching the database (see below). For electronic articles,
3416-629: The yearly Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts book series, which continued until the end of the 20th century. The first suggestion of a digital database of journal paper abstracts was made at a conference on Astronomy from Large Data-Bases held in Garching bei München in 1987. An initial version of ADS, with a database consisting of 40 papers, was created as a proof of concept in 1988. The ADS Abstract Service became available for general use via proprietary network software in April 1993, and it
3477-441: Was connected to SIMBAD a few months later. In early 1994 the ADS web-based service was launched, which effectively quadrupled the number of active users in the five weeks following its introduction. In 2011 the ADS launched ADS Labs Streamlined Search which introduced facets for query refinement and selection. In 2013, ADS Labs 2.0 started featuring a new search engine, full-text search functionality, scalable facets, and an API
3538-451: Was donated to the RAS. Between 1835 and 1916 women were not allowed to become fellows, but Anne Sheepshanks , Lady Margaret Lindsay Huggins, Agnes Clerke , Annie Jump Cannon and Williamina Fleming were made honorary members. In 1886 Isis Pogson was the first woman to attempt election as a fellow of the RAS, being nominated (unsuccessfully) by her father and two other fellows. All fellows had been male up to this time and her nomination
3599-446: Was expected to grow further to about 900 GB by 2007. No further information has been published (2005). The database initially contained only astronomical references, but has now grown to incorporate three databases, covering astronomy references (including planetary sciences and solar physics), physics references (including instrumentation and geosciences), as well as preprints of scientific papers from arXiv . The astronomy database
3660-480: Was introduced. In 2015, the new ADS, code-named Bumblebee, was released as ADS-beta. The ADS-beta system features a micro-services API and client-side dynamic page loading served on a cloud platform. In May 2018 the beta label was dropped and Bumblebee became the default ADS interface—with some legacy features (ADS Classic) remaining available. Development continues to the present day, with an extensible API available: enabling users to build their own utilities on top of
3721-407: Was withdrawn when lawyers claimed that under the provisions of the society's royal charter, fellows were only referred to as he and as such had to be men. A Supplemental Charter in 1915 opened up fellowship to women. On 14 January 1916, Mary Adela Blagg , Ella K Church, A Grace Cook , Irene Elizabeth Toye Warner and Fiammetta Wilson were the first five women to be elected to Fellowship. One of
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