Alan William James Cousins

He was born in Three Anchor Bay, Cape Town, the eldest of four children, and his father Clarence Wilfred Cousins was a senior civil servant who served for a time as Secretary of Labour.

In the 1940s the technique of using a Fabry lens to obtain uniform stellar images for measurement, as used by E.G. Williams, became of great interest to Cousins, who then published his first list (with photovisual magnitude) of over 100 bright southern hemisphere stars in 1943, that he had observed at the Durban observatory.

[3] R. H. Stoy of the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope, was impressed by Cousins' results as they were comparable to those obtained by professional astronomers.

Cousins singlemindedly devoted himself for the last 50 years of his life to photometry and its improvement by application of the photoelectric effect.

[3] In his early 1990s Cousins started to use a newly-available red-sensitive photomultiplier tube as part of a photometric system for information gathering on the energy distribution of red stars.