BornLondon, England, 26 May 1826
DiedChurt, Surrey, England, 27 November 1875
In addition to his unique contributions to knowledge about the axis and rotation of the Sun, Richard Carrington produced a valuable catalog of the positions of circumpolar stars. The son of a wealthy Brentford, Middlesex, brewer, Carrington was, along with Johannes Hevel and William Lassell , one of several notable amateur astronomers whose astronomical careers were founded on brewing fortunes. Educated at Cambridge University, he served for 3 years as an assistant to Reverend Temple Chevalier at Durham University Observatory.
However, his father’s money made him “an unfettered man,” as he put it, and in 1853 Carrington set up a superior observatory of his own, at Redhill, Surrey, south of London. He commissioned a transit circle with a 5-in. object glass and a 4½-in. equatorial refractor from the instrument makers Troughton and Simms. Carrington also hired an assistant, George Harvey Simmonds, whose salary...
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Selected References
Anon. (1876). “Richard Christopher Carrington.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 36: 137–142.
Carrington, Richard Christopher (1857). A Catalogue of 3,735 Circumpolar Stars Observed at Redhill, In the Years 1854, 1855, and 1856 … for 1855.0. London: printed by George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, Printers to the Queen’s most excellent Majesty, and sold by Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.
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Teague, E. T. H. (1996). “Carrington’s Method of Determining Sunspot Positions.” Journal of the British Astronomical Association 106: 82–86.
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Sheehan, W. (2014). Carrington, Richard Christopher. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_9034
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