which he conducted without intermission until six months before his death, 2 Sept. 1830. At an early period of his life Carrington began to contribute occasional pieces in verse to the London and provincial papers. His poems are chiefly descriptive of the scenery and traditions of his native county, and are characterised by no small literary grace, although without striking individuality in matter or manner. In 1820 he published separately ‘The Banks of the Tamar,’ and in 1826 ‘Dartmoor.’ His collected poems, with a short memoir prefixed, appeared posthumously in two volumes in 1831.
[Memoir prefixed to his Collected Poems; Gent. Mag. ci. pt. i. 276–9; Brit. Mus. Cat.]
CARRINGTON, RICHARD CHRISTOPHER (1826–1875), astronomer, second son of Richard Carrington, the proprietor of a large brewery at Brentford, was born at Chelsea on 26 May 1826. 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. Bessel's and 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 equatoreal 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, 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 Red Hill, near Reigate, Surrey. In July 1853 a transit-circle of 5½ feet focus, reduced in scale from the Greenwich model, and an equatoreal of 4½ inches aperture, both by Simms, were in their places, and work was begun. Already, 9 Dec. 1853, Carrington presented to the Astronomical Society, 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 of 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 Feb. 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.
Meanwhile Carrington had adopted, and was cultivating with his usual felicity of treatment, a ‘second subject’ at that juncture of peculiar interest and importance. While his new observatory was in course of construction, he devoted some of his spare time to examining the drawings and records of sun-spots in possession of the Astronomical Society, and was much struck with the need and scarcity of systematic solar observations. Sabine's and Wolf's discovery of the coincidence between the magnetic and sunspot periods had just then been announced, and he believed he should be able to take advantage of the pre-occupation or inability of other observers to appropriate to himself, by ‘close and methodical research,’ the next ensuing eleven-year cycle. He accordingly resolved to devote his daylight energies to the sun, while reserving his nights for the stars. Solar physics as a whole, however, he prudently excluded from his field of view.
