Halley and Bradley

I read E.T.Whittaker's book, "History of theories of the aether and
electricity", almost 25 years ago and was motivated to look up a
lot of its classical references. One of them was Bradley's 1725
paper, I think in the Philosophical Transactions. My vague recollection
is that he tried to explain a recent discovery of the apparent motion of
the fixed stars, even after one corrects for the Earth's orbit, by
invoking the finiteness of the speed of light, the argument having
to do with whether light from the star is able to make it from one
end of the moving telescope to the observer at the other end.

At the time, I only looked up Bradley's article, not any of its
references. Yesterday, I learned that Halley had discovered in 1719
the proper motion of stars, which is still a fact and not explained
away by Bradley's ingenious idea.

I assumed, when I read Bradley's article, that the stars were all believed
to be fixed in the sky, and hence the term "the fixed stars" referred to
all stars and had long been the standard terminology to refer to the stars.
Now that I know that Halley actually discovered proper motion of the stars,
it occurs to me that the terminology, "fixed stars", might have been invented
immediately after Halley's discovery of proper motion in 1719, to distinguish
the stars that seemed to have a proper motion from those that didn't.
And then Bradley would have been talking about apparent motion of stars
that, according to this terminology, were considered fixed, and his paper
would only have been intended to show that the the fixed stars were not
really moving. In particular, it would not have been intended as a
refutation of Halley's discovery of proper motion, and there may not
have been further exchanges in a "dialogue" between Halley and Bradley,
since Halley's original discovery was not being disputed.

I haven't looked at Bradley's 1725 article since I read Whittaker's book
and my recollection might be faulty in some respects. For example,
I seemed to recall that Halley was the author, whereas Bradley only
referred to Halley in the opening paragraphs. So I might be wrong
about other details.

Anyway, here is what I would like to know:
(1) Does the terminology "fixed stars" date from Halley's discovery of
the proper motion of certain stars?
(2) Did Halley ever publish a reply to Bradley's 1725 article and was there
a dialogue on this point? If so, what are the references to the original
articles?
--
Ignorantly,
Allan Adler
* Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and
* comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.

This reply may have been sent but in case it wasn't, the idea was that
fixed stars and wandering stars(planets) probably dates from ancient
times and that according to Pannkeok's History of Astronomy,Halley's
'discovery' was just that some very bright stars like Aldebaran,Sirius
etc were further south then(1718 etc) than recorded earlier by Ptolemy
and Hipparchus allowing I suppose for the change in vantage point of
the earth due to the earth's orbit, precession etc.. And he argued that
this was not just because the earlier data was not as good as his data.
Bradley's speed of light delay 'measurement' of course depended on
the apparent motion of a northerly star above the orbital plane of the
earth so that when the earth was moving in one direction the star
appeared to be at a slightly different position on the celestial sphere
than when six months later the earth was moving in the opposite
direction.
A possible explanation for this is that the time it takes for light
from the star that becomes unblocked by the telescope to register in
the eye is a few nanoseconds and by this time the earth has moved 29km
divided by 10^9 in its orbital path so the starlight appears to
becoming from a different direction than when the same observation is
made six months later.
The speed of light gives the exact numbers here.

In message . com,
writes
A possible explanation for this is that the time it takes for light
from the star that becomes unblocked by the telescope to register in
the eye is a few nanoseconds and by this time the earth has moved 29km
divided by 10^9 in its orbital path so the starlight appears to
becoming from a different direction than when the same observation is
made six months later.
The speed of light gives the exact numbers here.

I thought that according to Ralph Sansbury there was no such thing as
the speed of light :-)