Sir Norman Lockyer

Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer (1836–1920) was an English astronomer and a pioneer of solar physics. Working first as a clerk in the War Office, he studied the sun with a spectroscope, and in 1868, observing a solar prominence, identified a yellow spectral line that he attributed to an unknown element he named helium. In 1869 he founded the scientific journal Nature, which he edited for fifty years. He later directed the Solar Physics Observatory in South Kensington and founded an observatory at Sidmouth. In his last decades he turned to the astronomical alignment of ancient monuments, writing The Dawn of Astronomy and Stonehenge and Other British Stone Monuments.