Biography

William Parsons, 3^rd Earl of Rosse

         William Parsons, 3^rd Earl of Rosse was born on the 17^th of June in the year 1800, and died on the 31^st of October in the year 1867. He was an English astronomer and subsequently this is where he held all his achievements. He built several telescopes in his life time, including the world’s largest telescope in 1845, which remained the largest for the rest of the century. He used this telescope to catalog a large number of galaxies and study other phenomena.

         Parson’s telescope was named the Leviathan of Parsonstown because of how big it was for that time. The telescope was seventy-two inches, or one meter, across.  This was particularly hard to do because the size was unprecedented for the time, and previous telescopic inventers either guarded their secrets or were unable to publish them. It took over two years to complete the construction on the telescope, 1845 – 1847, and when put into service it replaced an older thirty-six inch telescope that Parsons built as well. In addition to these two telescopes he built two others; a 24 inch one and a 15 inch one. He built a variety of optical reflecting telescopes, the greatest was the Leviathan.

          With these great telescopes, Parson carried out his pioneering of astronomical studies and discovered the spiral nature of, considered nebulas in his time, spiral galaxies. The first spiral galaxy he detected was M51, known today as the Whirlpool Galaxy. Parson had many sketches of this galaxy and they all closely resembled modern photographs. Parson went on to discover the Crab Nebula. He named it after a crab because based on a drawing he made from his older thirty-six inch telescope where it resembled a crab. Although, when he viewed it through his seventy-two inch telescope he produced a drawing of considerably different appearance, but still kept the original name.

          Another main point of Parson’s research was attempting to resolve the nebular hypothesis, which hypothesized that planets and stars were formed by gravity acting on gaseous nebulae. He did not believe that nebulas were truly gaseous, but rather that they were made of such an amount of fine stars that most telescopes could not resolve them all individually. He basically thought that nebulas were stellar in nature. Parson claimed he resolved the Orion nebula into its individual stars. In the end however, he could not establish sufficient scientific authority in his results to solve the questions by himself.

          William Parsons was an astonishing astronomer. His telescopes enabled him to discover and study new celestial bodies in space. He discovered hundreds of galaxies, nebulas, and other phenomena. His very last accomplishment was by his son, who published Parson’s last work that included the discovery of 226 NGC objects in Observations of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars Made With the Six-foot and Three-foot Reflectors at Birr Castle From the Year 1848 up to the Year 1878.