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"This book is truly a magnum opus, a labour of love, and a great work of scholarship. It is authoritative, detailed, thorough, superbly illustrated, well referenced, and all-encompassing. There is no nook or cranny of the history of astronomical photography or its proponents that has not been investigated, noted, and embellished with a relevant image. It is worth every single cent of its price. It is an essential addition to every astronomy library. Anyone with even a vague interest in the development of astrophysics will need to have this book to hand; it is a vital and reliable starting place for any historical research into the last two centuries of astronomical endeavour." Professor David W. Hughes, 'Observatory' magazine, February 2015. Read Full Review Here:

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Great pioneering telescope builders including William Parsons, Andrew Ainslie Common, Bernhard Schmidt, George Willis Ritchey and Henri Chretien; and the use of their telescopes in astronomical research and Astrophotography.
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VIII.1 William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse
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Item Name:
VIII.1 William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse
Item #:
Ch.VIII.1
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William Parsons (1800-1867) was the ‘Great Telescope’ Builder, whose 72-inch Reflector was for almost three quarters of a century the largest telescope in the world. He did something no one else had done before or since - create almost single handedly a telescope of such a size and use it to ‘afford us some insight into the construction of the material universe’. He made drawings of Deep Space Objects (DSOs) which showed for the very first time what many of them truly looked like. It was he who first discovered with his ‘Leviathan of Parsonstown’ the ‘Spiral’ nature of certain nebulae.

 

Document profile:

Number of Pages: 51

Number of Snippet Panels: 29

Number of Photographs/Illustrations: 78

Number of Notes/References: 79

 
Acknowledgements

 

The author would like to thank the Parsons family of Birr Castle, Ancestry.com, thePeerage.com, findmypast.co.uk, findmypast.ie, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the Royal Society of London; the Royal Astronomical Society of London; the William Henry Fox Talbot Archives, De Montford University; the Ordnance Survey and NASA for the use of the following items: text extracts from original sources, genealogical information, photographs, maps, drawings and illustrations included in this eBook.

 

VIII.1 William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse
 
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William Parsons, 3rd Earl  of Rosse, although obsessed with the construction of telescopes with speculum metal mirrors of ever increasing size, also cared for the well being of his tenants, during the time of the Irish potato famine.

Dr. Stefan Hughes began his career as a professional astronomer, gaining a 1st Class Honours degree in Astronomy from the University of Leicester in 1974 and his PhD four years later on the 'Resonance Orbits of Artificial Satellites due to Lunisolar Perturbations', which was published as a series of papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. After graduating he became a Research fellow in Astronomy, followed by a spell as a lecturer in Applied Mathematics at Queen Mary College, London. Then came a ten year long career as an IT Consultant. In 'mid life' he spent several years retraining as a Genealogist, Record Agent and Architectural Historian, which he practiced for a number of years before moving to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where for the past ten years he has been imaging the heavens, as well as researching and writing the 'Catchers of the Light' - A History of Astrophotography.

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