Innes, Robert Thorburn Ayton (1861–1933)
Scottish astronomer who emigrated to Australia (becoming a wine merchant)
before moving to South Africa as director of the Observatory at Johannesburg.
Innes measured stellar proper motions,
introduced the orbital parameters for double stars now known as Thiele-Innes
constants, in conjunction with the Danish astronomer Thorvald Nicolai
Thiele (1838–1910), and was the first to use a blink
comparator – an instrument with which he discovered the nearest
star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, in
1915. His Southern Double Star Catalogue (1927) included over 1,600
doubles that he had found.
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