High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Seth Barnes Nicholson (November 12, 1891 July 2, 1963) was an American astronomer.Nicholson was born in Springfield, Illinois and was raised in rural Illinois. He was educated at Drake University where he becae interested in astronomy.In 1914, at the University of California's Lick Observatory, while observing the recently-discovered Jupiter moon Pasiphaë, he discovered a new one: Sinope, whose orbit he computed for his Ph.D. thesis in 1915.