Born Battersea, (London), England, 5 November 1900
Died Hailsham, (East Sussex), England, 13 September 1981
John Porter was a sophisticated astronomical computer as well as a dedicated astronomical educator. While a schoolteacher of mathematics and chemistry, he devoted himself as an amateur astronomer to computational astronomy, becoming the director of the British Astronomical Association [BAA] Computing Section in 1937. Porter became an expert on the computation of the orbits of meteors. By the end of World War II, Porter had refined his skills in this area so extensively that he was awarded a Ph.D. for his research on the orbits of meteors and comets. After the war, Porter and John Prentice were invited to join (Sir) Alfred Lovell at Jodrell Bank Observatory where they assisted in the analysis of radar observations of meteor streams. They showed from velocity profiles that meteors were members of the Solar System and not interstellar particles. Porter's book, Comets and Meteor...
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Selected Reference
Wilkins, G. A. (1983). “John Guy Porter.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 24: 364–367.
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Williams, T.R. (2007). Porter, John Guy. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1114
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