Francis Beaufort (1774-1857) was an admiral of the British Navy who devised the scale for classifying wind force at sea. Since the (originally 13) force numbers of the Beaufort scale made no reference to the speed of the wind, many attempts have been made to relate the numbers with wind velocity.

For eight years starting in 1848, Beaufort directed the Arctic Council during its search for the explorer, Sir John Franklin, lost in his last polar voyage to search for the legendary Northwest Passage.

Named in honor of Carolyn Spellmann Shoemaker (born 1929-06-24; died 2021-08-13), comet and asteroid discoverer. Shoemaker began searching for asteroids in 1980, using plates taken at the U.K. Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring. She helped develop a new photographic survey program using the 0.46-m Schmidt camera at Palomar Mountain and a newly designed stereomicroscope, which greatly increased the efficiency of film scanning.

Named in honor of Leif J. Robinson, editor of ’Sky and Telescope’. Robinson’s career as an observer began with a series of planetary drawings and observations of the rapidly changing variable stars in the Orion Nebula. He worked at the Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles before joining the staff of the magazine in 1962 as an editorial assistant, and he succeeded the late Joseph Ashbrook as editor in 1980.

Named in memory of Harold Spencer Jones (1890-1960), successively astronomical assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, H.M. astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, and Astronomer Royal (1933-1955).  He also served as president of the IAU (1945-1948).  His work was devoted to fundamental positional astronomy, and he conclusively demonstrated that the small residuals in the apparent motions of the planets were due to the irregular rotation of the earth.

Named in memory of Walter Sydney Adams (1876-1956), whose spectroscopic studies of sunspots and stars led to the discovery, with A. Kohlschutter, of a spectroscopic method for determining stellar distances, the relative intensities of spectral lines being used to determine absolute magnitudes of both giant and main-sequence stars.  Adams identified Sirius B as the first white-dwarf star known, and his measurement of its gravitational redshift was taken as confirming evidence for the general theory of relativity.