Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 12.djvu/148

  prints by Faithorne, Lens, Pelham, Simon (later period), Smith (earlier period), Williams, and others. He lived at the Three Pigeons in Bedford Street, Covent Garden, and probably died about the beginning of 1725, as an advertisement in the ‘Daily Post’ of April in that year announced the sale of his household goods and stock-in-trade. Bowles and other publishers purchased some of his plates, and issued inferior impressions from them. There are mezzotint portraits of Cooper by P. Pelham, after J. Vander Vaart, dated 1724, of his son John (a child), of Priscilla (wife or daughter), and of Elizabeth (a young daughter).

 COOPER, EDWARD JOSHUA (1798–1863), astronomer, born at Stephen's Green, Dublin, in May 1798, was the eldest son of Edward Synge Cooper, upon whom, in 1800, through the death of his father, the Right Hon. Joshua Cooper of Markree Castle, co. Sligo, and the ill-health of his elder brother, devolved the management of the large family estates. From his mother, Anne, daughter of Harry Verelst, governor of Bengal, Cooper derived his first notions of astronomy. The taste was hereditary on the father's side also, and was confirmed by visits to the Armagh observatory during some years spent at the endowed school of that town. His education was continued at Eton, whence he passed on to Christ Church, Oxford, but left the university after two years without taking a degree. The ensuing decade was mainly devoted to travelling. By his constant practice of determining with portable instruments the latitudes and longitudes of the places visited, he accumulated a mass of geographical data, which, however, remained unpublished. In the summer of 1820 he met Sir William Drummond at Naples, and, by the interest of a controversy with him on the subject of the Dendera and Esneh zodiacs, was induced to visit Egypt for the purpose of obtaining accurate copies of them. He accordingly ascended the Nile as far as the second cataract in the winter of 1820–1, and brought home with him the materials of a volume entitled ‘Views in Egypt and Nubia,’ printed for private circulation at London in 1824. A set of lithographs from drawings by Bossi, a Roman artist engaged by Cooper for the journey, formed its chief interest, the descriptive letterpress by himself containing little novelty.

His excursions eastward reached to Turkey and Persia, while in 1824–5 he traversed Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, as far as the North Cape. Unremitting attention to its conditions led him to regard Munich and Nice as the best adapted spots in Europe for astronomical observation. Succeeding on his father's death in 1830 to his position at Markree, he immediately determined upon erecting an observatory there. An object-glass by Cauchoix, 131/3 inches across and of 25 feet focal length, the largest then in existence, was purchased by him in 1831, and mounted equatorially by Thomas Grubb of Dublin in 1834. Cast iron was for the first time employed as the material of the tube and stand; but a dome of the requisite size not being then feasible, the instrument was set up, and still remains, in the open air. A five-foot transit by Troughton, a meridian-circle three feet in diameter, fitted with a seven-inch telescope, ordered in 1839 on the occasion of a visit to the works of Ertel in Bavaria (see, Astr. Nach. xcii. 65), and a comet-seeker, likewise by Ertel, acquired in 1842, were successively added to the equipment of what was authoritatively described in 1851 as ‘undoubtedly the most richly furnished of private observatories’ (Monthly Notices, xi. 104).

Cooper worked diligently in it himself when at Markree, and obtained, March 1842, in Mr. Andrew Graham an assistant who gave a fresh impulse to its activity. By both conjointly the positions of fifty stars within two degrees of the pole were determined in 1842–1843 (ib. vii. 14); systematic meridian observations of minor planets were set on foot; the experiment was successfully made, 10–12 Aug. 1847, of determining the difference of longitude between Markree and Killiney, ninety-eight miles distant, by simultaneous observations of shooting stars; and a ninth minor planet was discovered by Graham 25 April 1848, named ‘Metis,’ at the suggestion of the late Dr. Robinson, because its detection had ensued from the adoption of a plan of work laid down by Cooper. Meteorological registers were continuously kept at Markree during thirty years from 1833, many of the results being communicated to the Meteorological Society. In 1844–5 Cooper and Graham made together an astronomical tour through France, Germany, and Italy. The great refractor formed part of their luggage, and, mounted on a wooden stand with altitude and azimuth movements, served the former to sketch the Orion nebula, and to detect independently at Naples, 7 Feb. 1845, a comet (1844, iii.) already observed in the southern hemisphere.

From the time that the possibility of further planetary discoveries had been recalled to the attention of astronomers by the finding of