- William Henry Smyth
William Henry Smyth (
January 21 ,1788 –September 9 ,1865 ) was an Englishsailor andastronomer . He was the father ofCharles Piazzi Smyth , SirWarington Wilkinson Smyth and General Sir Henry Augustus Smyth. Of his daughters, Henrietta Grace Smyth married Professor Baden Powell and was mother ofRobert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell , while Georgiana Rosetta Smyth married SirWilliam 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 theAmerican Revolution emigrated to England where his son was born.Smyth joined the
Royal Navy and during theNapoleonic wars he served in theMediterranean , eventually achieving the rank of Admiral. He marriedEliza Anne "Annarella" Warington in 1815. During ahydrographic survey in 1817 he met the Italianastronomer Giuseppe Piazzi in Palermo, Sicily, and visited hisobservatory ; this sparked his interest inastronomy and in 1825 he retired from the Navy to establish a private observatory in Bedford,England , equipped with a 5.9-inch refractortelescope . He used this instrument to observe a variety ofdeep sky object s over the course of the 1830s, includingdouble star s,star cluster s andnebula e. He published his observations in 1844 in the "Cycle of Celestial Objects ", which earned him theGold 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 atHartwell House . Smyth still had the opportunity to use it since his residence at St. John's Lodge in Stone was not 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 ofSeptember 9 , at age 78, he died. He was buried in the churchyard at Stone nearAylesbury .A
lunar mare was namedMare Smythii in his honour.External links
* [http://adsabs.harvard.edu//full/seri/MNRAS/0026//0000121.000.html Obituary]
* [http://pinetreeweb.com/bp-admiral.htm Biography]
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