On July 12th 1874 Robert Newall and Norman Lockyer observed comet Coggia using the Thomas Cooke & Sons 25 inch telescope. The observations were made at Newall’s observatory at Gateshead. The 25 inch was at the time the largest telescope in the world.
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On November 6th 1872, D. Winstanley whilst looking over the sea a few minutes before 10.00 o’clock saw a meteor of large size. It was accompanied by a short scintillating train and moved slowly quite parallel with the horizon directly north. Its elevation was about 15 degrees and its rate of motion was about 1.5 degrees per second. The night was dark and somewhat cloudy, and the line described by the meteor was seemingly quite straight.
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Comet Klinkerfues 1854 was seen from the Whitehaven Observatory on the night of October 7th 1854. The comet had been discovered by the German astronomer Ernest Klinkerfues on the night of September 12th 1854 at the Berlin observatory. From Whitehaven it was described as looking like a round nebulous body without any appearance of a tail. The comet was seen in Ursa Major the Great Bear.
There were very few observations of the comet and it is
therefore classed as a near parabolic comet with no certainty when it will come
close to the Sun next.
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Abridged from the Times January 9th 1875
The further news which we have received from Mauritius is much more hopeful than that telegraphed by Lord Lindsay, for it includes an account of the doings of Mr Meldrum, the director of the Government Observatory in that island.
Mr Meldrum having only a few weeks before the transit of Venus been provided with a perfect telescope of six inches aperture by Thomas Cooke & Sons, York has been fortunate enough to obtain an observation of the ingress although both Lord Lindsay and the German party were prevented from doing this but the cloudy state of the sky. But although Mr Meldrum obtained the two-interior contact 5s, clouds and haze were at intervals passing over the Sun, which, in fact, was obscuring during the greater part of the transit, passing showers of rain not being wanting to harass the observers.
At times beautiful definitions of the planet were observed,
especially soon after the first interior contact. Then there was a long period
of obscuration, after which, most fortunately, the Sun shone out for the second
interior contact. A few minutes before the last interior contact the Sun was
again obscured, and when the clouds passed away the transit was over.
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During April and May 1841 a course of 6 popular lectures on astronomy were give at the mechanics Institute at Driffield in the East Riding of Yorkshire by Dr Henderson of the Liverpool Observatory. Dr Henderson was the author of various works on astronomy, geography and navigation.
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In Warsaw in 1898 an observatory was established in an observatory a short distance north west of the university there. The observatory had originally belonged to the Polish amateur astronomer Jan Walery Jedrzejewicz (1835-1887) at Plonsk in central Poland.
Among the equipment in the observatory was a 5 inch Thomas
Cooke & Sons telescope. Among the objects that Jedrzejewicz observed were
double stars, sunspots, lunar occultations and the positions of 16 comets.
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