HM Nautical Almanac Office - Definition and Overview

The HM Nautical Almanac Office (HMNAO), now part of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Abingdon in Oxfordshire, was established in 1832 on the site of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, where the Nautical Almanac had been published since 1767.

In 1937 it became part of RGO and moved with it, first to Herstmonceux, near Hailsham in East Sussex in 1948, then to Cambridge in 1980. When RGO closed in 1998 HMNAO was transferred to its present location.

Leaders of HMNAO

Superintendents of the Nautical Almanac

• Thomas Young (1818–1829) — physicist and polymath
• John Pond (1829–1831) — Astronomer Royal
• W. S. Stratford (1831–1853) — set up a central bureaucracy to replace the system of home-based computers
• John Russell Hind (1853–1891) — discovered a number of asteroids in the earlier part of his career
• A. M. W. Downing (1891–1910)
• Philip Herbert Cowell (1910–1930) — best remembered for his work with Andrew Crommelin on the calculation of the orbit of Halley's Comet by numerical integration, in preparation for its return in 1910
• Leslie Comrie (1930–1936) — a pioneer of numerical computation
• D. H. Sadler (1936–1970)
• G. A. Wilkins (1970–1989)
• B. D. Yallop (1989–1996)

Heads of HM Nautical Almanac Office

• A. T. Sinclair (1996–1998)
• P. T. Wallace (1998–present)

Publications

• The Astronomical Almanac
• The Nautical Almanac
• Astronomical Phenomena
• The Star Almanac
• The UK Air Almanac

External link

• HMNAO (http://www.nao.rl.ac.uk)
• List of Superintendents and Heads of HMNAO (http://www.nao.rl.ac.uk/nao/history/super.html)