Robert T. A. Innes

Robert Thorburn Ayton Innes FRSE FRAS (10 November 1861 – 13 March 1933) was a British-born South African astronomer best known for discovering Proxima Centauri in 1915, and numerous binary stars.

[2] Innes published a double star catalog in 1900[3] that assimilated all earlier observations by southern astronomers, to provide the longest baseline for orbit determination.

Despite having had no formal training in astronomy, he was invited to the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope by the HM Astronomer Sir David Gill in 1894 and appointed in 1896.

John Franklin-Adams,[7] a pioneer of astrophotography, presented his 10-inch astrographic camera[8] to the Union Observatory, which Innes used in the discovery of Proxima Centauri.

The definitive distance was measured by Harold Lee Alden at the Yale observatory station in Johannesburg which was equipped with a long focus camera designed for stellar parallax work.

When he started observing them as an amateur in Australia, the choice plums had already been picked by earlier astronomers, notably James Dunlop and John Herschel.

Innes tirelessly campaigned for foreign investment in South Africa's astronomy infrastructure - he believed that its clear skies were ideally suited for astronomical observation.

He discovered some 1600 new pairs of double stars, had a great interest in stellar proper motions and devoted much time to the study of Jupiter's satellites.