Cooke Telescope Tales - Cooke telescope to the Isle of Wight

 Charles Pritchard FRAS (1808-1893)  of Hurst Hill on the Isle of Wight purchased from Thomas Cooke & Sons in 1865 an equatorial mounting for his Cooke telescope. I can only assume he wanted to upgrade the mounting for the telescope he had .

Earlier in  the late 1850s Pritchard purchased from Cooke & Sons a 6.75 inch telescope.

 Pritchard was elected Savilian professor of Astronomy at Oxford University in 1870. 

In 1882 he undertook the study of the brightness of 2,784 stars, this was an important  project at the time and for this work he was presented with the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1886.

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