Name Michael Feast | ||
Michael William Feast (born 19 December 1926 in Deal, England) is an honorary professor of astronomy at the University of Cape Town, noted particularly for his work on the cosmic distance scale using variable stars.
Career and honours
Feast holds the degrees of BSc (Hons) and PhD from London. From 1949 to 1951 he worked with Gerhard Herzberg at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, following which from 1952 to 1974 he was at the Radcliffe Observatory, Pretoria He was also director of the South African Astronomical Observatory from 1977 to 1992.
He received the DeBeers Medal from the South African Institute of Physics in 1992 and the Gill Medal from the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa in 1983. Feast is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa. The University of Cape Town awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science degree in 1993. Feast is an editor of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
His most frequently cited paper (440 times) relates to his pioneering study of the brightest stars in the Magellanic Clouds with Thackeray and Wesselink; see, for example, Hodge (1999).
Much of his work has related to the Cepheid period-luminosity relation, for example that on its zero-point as determined via the Hipparcos satellite