Everything about William Henry Smyth totally explained
William Henry Smyth (
January 21,
1788 –
September 9,
1865) was an
English astronomer. He was the father of
Charles Piazzi Smyth, Sir
Warington Wilkinson Smyth and General Sir Henry Augustus Smyth. Of his daughters, Henrietta Grace Smyth married Professor
Baden Powell and was mother of
Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, while Georgiana Rosetta Smyth married Sir
William Henry Flower.
He was born in
Westminster,
London. He was the only son of Joseph Smyth and Georgina Caroline Pitt Pilkington, granddaughter of the Irish writer and protégéé of Jonathan Swift, Laetitia Pilkington. His father was a colonial
American who lived in East Jersey. He was an
English loyalist, however, and after the
American Revolution emigrated to England where his son was born.
Smyth joined the
Royal Navy and during the
Napoleonic wars he served in the
Mediterranean, eventually achieving the rank of Admiral. He married
Eliza Anne "Annarella" Warington in
1815. During a
hydrographic survey in
1817 he met the
Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi in
Palermo, Sicily, and visited his
observatory; this sparked his interest in
astronomy and in
1825 he retired from the Navy to establish a private observatory in
Bedford,
England, equipped with a 5.9-inch
refractor telescope. He used this instrument to observe a variety of
deep sky objects over the course of the
1830s, including
double stars,
star clusters and
nebulae. He published his observations in
1844 in the
Cycle of Celestial Objects, which earned him the
Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in
1845 and also the presidency of the society. The first volume of this work was on general astronomy, but the second volume became known as the
Bedford Catalogue and contained Smyth's observations of 1,604 double stars and nebulae. It served as a standard reference work for many years afterward; no astronomer had previously made as extensive a catalogue of dim objects such as this.
Having completed his observations, Smyth retired to
Cardiff in
1839. His observatory was dismantled and the telescope was sold to Dr.
John Lee and re-erected in a new observatory of his own design at
Hartwell House. Smyth still had the opportunity to use it since his residence at St. John's Lodge in Stone wasn't far from its new location, and did a large number of additional astronomical observations from
1839 to
1859. The telescope is presently in the Science Museum, London.
Smyth suffered a
heart attack in early September, 1865, and at first seemed to recover. On
September 8 he showed the planet
Jupiter to his young grandson, Arthur Smyth Flower, through a telescope. A few hours later in the early morning of
September 9, at age 78, he died. He was buried in the churchyard at
Stone near
Aylesbury.
A
lunar mare was named
Mare Smythii in his honour.
Further Information
Get more info on 'William Henry Smyth'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://william_henry_smyth.totallyexplained.com">William Henry Smyth Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
