page_title: James Dunlop
section_title: Return to Australia
hierarchical_section_title: James Dunlop / Return to Australia
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Jane Dunlop.
context_page_description: James Dunlop FRSE was a Scottish astronomer, noted for his work in Australia. He served as astronomer's assistant who was hired by Sir Thomas Brisbane to work at his private observatory, once located at Paramatta, New South Wales, about 23 kilometres west of Sydney during the 1820s and 1830s. Dunlop was mostly a visual observer, doing stellar astrometry work for Brisbane, and after its completion, then independently discovered and catalogued many new telescopic southern double stars and deep-sky objects. He later became the Superintendent of Paramatta Observatory when it was finally sold to the New South Wales Government.
context_section_description: In April 1831, Dunlop was appointed superintendent of the Government observatory at Parramatta. He was selected mainly from his good knowledge of Colony and the observatory site, but the real reason for his selection was more because even though such an astronomical position was formally advertised, nobody applied for the astronomical tenure. Here he was to succeed Rümker with the reasonable good salary of £300 a year. He arrived at Sydney on 6 November 1831 and found the observatory in a deplorable condition; rain had entered the building, roofing plaster had fallen down, and many important records were destroyed. Dunlop succeeded in getting the building repaired and started on his work with energy, but around 1835 his health began to fail; he had no assistant, and the building, having been attacked by white ants, fell gradually into decay. In August 1847, he resigned his position, and went to live on his farm on Brisbane Waters, an arm of Broken Bay. He died on 22 September 1848. In 1816 Dunlop married his cousin Jean Service, who survived him. In addition to the medal of the Royal Astronomical Society Dunlop was awarded medals for his work by the King of Denmark in 1833, and the Institut Royal de France in 1835. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1832, his proposer being Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane.
  Papers on, and references to, the work of Dunlop may be found in the  Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and in the Transactions of the Royal Society between the years 1823 and 1839.
caption: Jane Dunlop
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