[3] At that time, the Royal Commission was reviewing Scottish Universities and recommended that the chair should not be filled 'until a suitable observatory... could be established' [3] Meanwhile, outside the University, the Edinburgh Astronomical Institution, a club of private individuals, had succeeded in building an observatory on Calton Hill in a new building designed by William Playfair.
Thomas Henderson's main claim to fame is being, along with Friedrich Bessel, the first astronomer to measure the parallax of a star, and hence a reliable stellar distance.
He also carried out extensive travel, both to observe transits of Venus, and to continue Piazzi Smyth's researches into mountain top astronomy.
He later became famous for organising eclipse expeditions which helped to proved Einstein's General Relativity Theory, and for instigating the transmission of the "pips" from the Greenwich Observatory to the BBC.
Before coming to Edinburgh Sampson was well known for pioneering work on the colour temperature of stars, and a theory of the motions of the Galilean satellites.
Greaves kept the national time service going the war, and led extensive work on determining the temperatures of stars, and the physical properties of their atmospheres, using spectrophotometry, as well as studies of the effect of sunspots in terrestrial magnetism.
The first, together with his wife Mary Bruck (nee Conway) was the creation of the first full Astrophysics degree, and the expansion of first year astronomy teaching to large classes of students from many disciplines.
This work began with the creation of a station at Monte Porzio in Italy, followed by the design of a Northern Hemisphere Observatory in La Palma (which was then implemented by the Royal Greenwich Observatory), the building and operation of the UK Schmidt Telescope in Australia, and finally the building and operation of the infra-red specialised UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii.
The next holder of both the Regius Professorship and the Astronomer Royal position was Vincent Reddish, who had been at ROE since the 1960s, and in fact was to a large extent responsible for many of the advances in the Bruck era - automation, systematic sky surveys, and the creation of the UK Schmidt Telescope and UKIRT.
Malcolm Longair was appointed to the joint position in 1980, and continued the trends started by Bruck and Reddish of making the Royal Observatory Edinburgh a centre of astronomical technology and sky survey work.
Longair resigned in 1990, during a difficult period of political discussion over the structure of British Astronomy, and moved to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.