Background
Carrington was born on May 26, 1826, in Chelsea, London, the second son of Richard Carrington, the proprietor of a large brewery at Brentford, and his wife Esther Clarke Aplin.
Cambridge CB2 1TQ, UK
From 1844 Carrington studied at Trinity College, receiving Bachelor of Arts degree in 1848.
Carrington was born on May 26, 1826, in Chelsea, London, the second son of Richard Carrington, the proprietor of a large brewery at Brentford, and his wife Esther Clarke Aplin.
Carrington received his basic education at a private school, located at Hedley and run by a Mr. Faithful. His father was desirous that his son should be prepared for the respectable profession of the Church and therefore arranged that he spend some time in the house of a clergyman named Blogard before beginning his studies in theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1844. Even before this time, however, Carrington had come to realize that his natural aptitudes lay rather in the pursuit of the physical sciences, particularly in those aspects involving observation and mechanical ingenuity.
Between 1842 and the completion of his B.A. degree in 1848, Carrington submitted no fewer than six quite substantial contributions to collections of problems in various branches of mathematics, physics, and astronomy. The final impulse to his resolution to be a practical astronomer came when he attended the lectures of the Plumian professor, James Challis, on that subject; and when his father raised no objection to this choice of career, he accepted the post of observer at the University of Durham and began work there in October 1849 under the direction of the Rev. Temple Chevalier.
Carrington’s early contributions to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and to the Astronomische Nachrichten, containing the preliminary results of observations of minor planets and comets, ensured his prompt admittance to membership in the Royal Astronomical Society when his application was considered on 14 March 1851. By this time Carrington was becoming discontent with his duties in Durham and saw little prospect of better instruments being purchased to enable him to extend the scope of his activities. He wished in particular to complete the work of Bessel and Argelander by systematically surveying the spherical zone of the heavens within 9° of the north celestial pole and preparing a catalog of circumpolar stars brighter than the eleventh magnitude - a deficiency of which his observations of minor planets had made him well aware. He therefore resolved to use his substantial means to set up his own observatory and buy his own instruments, and thus he resigned his appointment in Durham in March 1852. The site that Carrington selected for his private observatory was Redhill, near Reigate, Surrey. He worked steadily with “talent and zeal, untiring devotion and industry, and an unsparing but prudent application of private resources” during the course of the next three years to produce his Catalogue of 3735 Circumpolar Stars (1857), which was printed at public expense by the Lords of the Admiralty and received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1859. Its excellence of design and execution and the unquestioned reliability of the results were largely responsible for its author’s election as a fellow of the Royal Society on 7 June 1860.
Carrington is better remembered by posterity, however, for his pioneering investigations of the motions of sunspots. While his observatory at Redhill was in the course of construction, he spent some of his time examining drawings and records of sunspots possessed by the Royal Astronomical Society and was struck by the scarcity of systematic solar observations. Since he was well aware that no public observatory was then occupied with work of this nature, he resolved to remedy the observational deficiency by “close and methodical research” during the daylight hours whenever the time required to reduce his stellar observations should permit. The method that he devised and employed throughout the seven-and-one-half-year period to which his sunspot observations refer was one that required no micrometer and no clockwork.
His father’s death in July 1858 made it necessary for Carrington to take over the management of the brewery and prevented his further personal participation in this program; the continual pressure of the business subsequently caused him to abandon the project altogether. His Observations of the Spots on the Sun From Novi 9, 1853, to March 24, 1861, Made at Redhill, a ponderous quarto volume, was published in 1863 with the aid of Royal Society funds. Despite his devotion to the above-mentioned tasks, Carrington took time to travel, although his motives for doing so were inevitably linked to his astronomical interests. As a young man of twenty-five he went from Durham to the small town of Lilia Edet in Sweden to observe a total solar eclipse; he described this experience in an Admiralty pamphlet printed and circulated in May 1858 to those who might be in South America to witness a similar eclipse later that year. After a second visit to the Continent in 1856, he drew up a valuable report on the condition of a number of German observatories (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 17). He made a number of other contributions to the Monthly Notices, including three articles on the motions and distribution of sunspots and another on the distribution of cometary orbits with regard to the direction of solar motion. He also described a solar flare that he had observed for a few minutes on 1 September 1859, a phenomenon which at that time was quite unknown.
In a letter to the vice-chancellor of Cambridge, dated 13 April 1861, Carrington claims to have visited and carefully inspected, and considered the construction and adaptation of, many of the leading Continental observatories; all of those in England, Scotland, and Ireland; and very many private establishments at home and abroad. Moreover, he knew nearly all the opticians and their works and nearly all the observers, and was unusually familiar with materials and construction of both buildings and instruments. The failure of his bid for the directorship of the Cambridge Observatory on the occasion of Challis’ resignation came as a great blow to him; indeed, judging from a comment in a letter to John Herschel written five weeks earlier, it would appear to have been directly responsible for his decision to sell the Redhill observatory about this time. Nevertheless, Carrington was unable to suppress his love for astronomy and was soon contemplating the prospect of going to Chile to observe the stars in the neighborhood of the south celestial pole; however, a severe illness in 1865 left his health permanently impaired and this plan never materialized. Instead, he disposed of his brewery and retired from business to Churt, Surrey, where he established a new observatory on top of an isolated conical hill in a lonely and picturesque spot known as the Middle Devil’s Jump.
Carrington died at his home on 27 November 1875, apparently as the result of a brain hemorrhage, only ten days after his wife Rosa had been found dead in bed after taking an overdose of chloral hydrate. In his will Carrington left £2,000 to the Royal Astronomical Society, with which he had been actively associated for nearly half his lifetime and which he had served so conscientiously as secretary from 1857 to 1862.
It is known that Carrington had a wife, named Rosa, who died ten days prior to him, in her bed, after taking an overdose of chloral hydrate.