Richard Christopher Carrington (26 May 1826 – 27 November 1875) was an English amateur astronomer whose 1859 astronomical observations demonstrated the existence of solar flares as well as suggesting their electrical influence upon the Earth and its aurorae; and whose 1863 records of sunspot observations revealed the differential rotation of the Sun.
Life
Carrington was born at Chelsea, the second son of Richard Carrington, the proprietor of a large brewery at Brentford, and his wife Esther Clarke Aplin. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1844; but, though destined for the church, rather by his father's than by his own desire, his scientific tendencies gradually prevailed, and received a final impulse towards practical astronomy from Professor Challis's lectures on the subject. This change in the purpose of his life was unopposed, and he had the prospect of ample means; so that it was purely with the object of gaining experience that he applied, shortly after taking his degree as thirty-sixth wrangler in 1848, for the post of observer in the University of Durham. He entered upon his duties there in October 1849, but soon became dissatisfied with their narrow scope. The observatory was ill supplied with instruments, and the leisure left him for study served only to widen his aims. Friedrich Bessel's and Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander's star-zones, above all, struck him as a model for imitation, and he resolved to complete by extending them to the pole. Desirous of advancing so far beyond his predecessors as to include in his survey stars of the tenth magnitude, he vainly applied for a suitable instrument, and at last, hopeless of accomplishing any part of his design at Durham, or of benefiting by any further stay, he resigned his position there in March 1852. He had not, however, been idle. Some of his observations, especially of minor planets and comets, made with a Fraunhofer equatorial of 6½ inches aperture, had been published, in a provisional state, in the ‘Monthly Notices’ and ‘Astronomische Nachrichten,’ and the whole were definitively embodied in a volume entitled ‘Results of Astronomical Observations made at the Observatory of the University, Durham, from October 1849 to April 1852’ (Durham, 1855). His admission as a member of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), 14 March 1851, conveyed a prompt recognition of his exceptional merits as an observer.
In June 1852 he fixed upon a site for an observatory and dwelling-house at Redhill, Surrey. In July 1853 a transit-circle of 5½ feet focus, reduced in scale from the Greenwich model, and an equatorial of 4½ inches aperture, both by Simms, were in their places, and work was begun. On 9 December 1853, Carrington presented to the RAS, as the result of a preliminary survey, printed copies of nine draft maps, containing all stars down to the eleventh magnitude within 9° of the Pole (Monthly Notices, xiv. 40). Three years' steady pursuance of the adopted plan produced, in 1857, ‘A Catalogue of 3,735 Circumpolar Stars observed at Redhill in the years 1854, 1855, and 1856, and reduced to Mean Positions for 1855.’ The work was printed at public expense, the decision to that effect by the Lords of the Admiralty rendering unnecessary the acceptance of Leverrier's handsome offer to include it in the next forthcoming volume of the ‘Annales’ of the Paris observatory. It was rewarded with the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, in presenting which, 11 February 1859, Mr. Main dwelt upon the eminent utility of the design, as well as the ‘standard excellence’ of its execution (ib. xix. 162). It included a laborious comparison of Schwerd's places for 680 stars with those obtained at Redhill, and an elaborate dissertation on the whole theory of corrections as applied to stars near the pole. Ten corresponding maps, copper-engraved, accompanied the catalogue.