Royal Astronomical Society

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 12th of January 1820, fourteen men gathered for dinner at the Freemasons' Tavern in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London. They came with a shared frustration: Britain's most powerful scientific body, the Royal Society, had spent years under the presidency of an octogenarian whose expertise lay in botany and natural history, not the physical sciences. Astronomers felt left behind. So they decided to build something new.

  Among those fourteen were names that still ring through the history of science: John Herschel, Charles Babbage, and Francis Baily. By the time dessert was cleared, a committee had been formed, a secretary appointed, and a young Herschel tasked with drafting the new organisation's founding address.

  What emerged from that dinner would grow into the Royal Astronomical Society, today home to more than 4,000 fellows drawn from dozens of countries. It organises landmark conferences, publishes journals that have run for nearly two centuries, and holds a library whose rare book collection is second in the UK only to the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh.

  But the society's story runs far deeper than its present status. It was shaped by battles over who deserved to belong, a quest for a royal charter, and a moment in 1919 when its members helped confirm one of the most consequential theories in the history of physics.

• 2. The Dinner That Started It All

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  Francis Baily had published a formal recommendation for an astronomical society in 1819, and William Pearson had floated the idea as early as 1812. The frustration driving both men had a specific target. Sir Joseph Banks had led the Royal Society for decades. His own domain was botany and natural history, and many professional astronomers felt the institution no longer served their work.

  At the Freemasons' Tavern dinner, eight men were appointed to a rules committee. Daniel Moore was elected chairman, Baily took the role of secretary, and Herschel was asked to write the address that would define the new body's mission. The organisation was initially called the Astronomical Society of London.

  Its first general meeting was held on the 8th of February 1820, in the rooms of the Geological Society in Bedford Street, Covent Garden. The first council meeting followed on the 10th of March 1820. The stated goals were the promotion of astronomy through accurate calculations and observations, and practical purposes like navigation. The society also pushed early on for reform of the Nautical Almanac.

  The motto was chosen by William Herschel, father of founding member John: Quicquid nitet notandum, or "whatever shines should be observed." It remains the society's motto to this day.

  The founding moment hit an immediate snag. The society's first elected president, the Duke of Somerset, resigned after just one week. He told members that Banks believed the new body would damage the Royal Society. William Herschel then agreed to serve as the first president in name, though his advanced age meant he never actually presided over a meeting.

• 3. Charter, Medals, and Early Milestones

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  The society first applied for a royal charter in February 1830, when its president Sir James South petitioned the King. The King signed as Patron of the Society on the 15th of December 1830, and a Royal Charter was formally granted by William IV on the 7th of March 1831. From that point the body assumed the name Royal Astronomical Society.

  Publication had been a core activity from the very beginning. The Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society launched in 1822, and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society began in 1827, with Richard Sheepshanks as its first editor. That journal continues to this day.

  The Gold Medal, the society's highest honour, was first awarded in 1824. The recipients that year were Charles Babbage, one of the founding dinner guests, and Johann Franz Encke. In 1828, Caroline Herschel received the medal for her catalogue of nebulae. She was the first woman to be so honoured. The next woman to receive the Gold Medal would not come until Vera Rubin in 1996, a gap of 168 years.

  The society also extended honorary membership to women before full fellowship was permitted. In 1835, Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville became the first women to receive that status. Other women granted honorary membership over the years included Anne Sheepshanks, Lady Huggins, Agnes Mary Clerke, Annie Jump Cannon, and Williamina Fleming.

  In 1846, the society absorbed the Spitalfields Mathematical Society, a body founded in 1717 that had fallen on hard financial times. Its nineteen remaining members received lifetime membership in the RAS; in return, the mathematical society's library passed to the RAS.

• 4. Women and the Fight for Fellowship

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  In 1886, Isis Pogson was nominated for fellowship by her father and two other fellows. Lawyers then examined the society's Royal Charter and noted that it referred to fellows only using the pronoun he. On those grounds, Pogson's nomination was withdrawn. Women were effectively barred from full membership until a legal workaround could be found.

  The solution came through a Supplemental Charter granted in 1915, which opened fellowship to women. On the 14th of January 1916, five women were elected to fellowship simultaneously: Mary Adela Blagg, Ella K Church, A Grace Cook, Irene Elizabeth Toye Warner, and Fiammetta Wilson. Eleven women in total were elected during that year.

  The Friends of the RAS, a separate initiative launched in 2009, opened participation even further, welcoming those without professional qualifications or specialist knowledge who simply shared an enthusiasm for astronomy and geophysics.

  Amateur astronomers had also found a partial home through a parallel channel. Several RAS members helped found the British Astronomical Association in 1890. That organisation admitted both men and women from its very first day, predating the RAS's own admission of women by more than two decades.

  The presidency itself took longer to reach gender parity. The first woman elected to serve as president of the Royal Astronomical Society was Dame Carole Jordan, who took office in 1994.

• 5. Einstein, Eddington, and 1919

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  The total solar eclipse of the 29th of May 1919 gave the Royal Astronomical Society a role in one of the defining moments of modern physics. The Joint Permanent Eclipse Committee of the Royal Society and the RAS organised two separate expeditions to observe the eclipse: one to Príncipe, off the west coast of Africa, and another to Sobral, Brazil.

  Arthur Eddington led the effort, coordinated by Astronomer Royal Frank Watson Dyson. The expeditions aimed to test Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, specifically its prediction that starlight would bend when passing near a massive object like the sun. The eclipse provided the only conditions under which stars close to the sun could be seen and measured.

  The results were presented at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the RAS on the 6th of November 1919. The measurements confirmed Einstein's prediction. The announcement brought Einstein worldwide fame almost overnight.

  Geophysics had long attracted interest among members but gained formal standing in the society's scope during the twentieth century. Papers in the field first ran in Monthly Notices, then in a dedicated Geophysical Supplement from 1922 to 1957. A fully separate Geophysical Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society launched in 1958, and it later merged with two European journals to become Geophysical Journal International, which the society continues to publish today.

• 6. Burlington House and the Library

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  The society spent its early decades moving between borrowed spaces. It met first in the Geological Society's rooms in Bedford Street, Covent Garden, then rented space from the Medical and Chirurgical Society at 57 Lincoln's Inn Fields. In 1834, the government placed seven rooms in Somerset House at the society's disposal, later expanding to eight.

  When pressure from a growing Civil Service forced the government to reclaim space at Somerset House, new purpose-built apartments were commissioned in the wings of Burlington House on Piccadilly, designed by architects R. R. Banks and Charles Barry Jr. The RAS moved in 1874 and held its first meeting there on the 13th of November of that year.

  Burlington House has been the society's home ever since. Today the building holds meeting rooms and a library available to fellows and researchers from outside the society.

  The library itself is a significant research resource. It receives around 300 current periodicals in astronomy and geophysics and holds more than 10,000 books, spanning popular works through to specialist conference proceedings. Its rare book collection is matched in the United Kingdom only by the collection held at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh.

  The society marked its bicentenary in 2020, two centuries after that dinner at the Freemasons' Tavern. Its current president, Jim Wild, began his two-year term in May 2026.