Astronomy Now - January 2021

I

Ian Seymour

Key moments in astronomy

n 1976, Uckeld public library had a small corner cupboard, reluctantly unlocked, grandly marked
‘Local History Collection’. It contained little more than Charles Leeson Price’s Observations Upon
the Climate of Uckeld (1871).

ere was a vague sense that something was wrong with the book. In a town whose local heroes
were Charles Dawson and Lord Lucan, it took quite a lot to get a bad reputation in Uckeld. Yet
Leeson Price had gone to the bad. Inheriting money, he moved to neighbouring Crowborough.
Authoring Observations on the Climate and Topography of Crowborough (1885), he spent the rest of his
shameless existence talking up the dreadful place. Such perdy echoes down the ages – or at least in
Uckeld libraries.

is wicked book changed the life of an innocent Welsh astronomer named Isaac Roberts. Born at
Groes, near Denbigh, on 27 January 1829, Isaac was a self-educated farmer’s son who enjoyed an
extremely successful career in the Liverpool building trade. By 1880 he had also established a high
reputation as a geologist and amateur astronomer.

A keen photographer, in 1883 he began astrophotography using ‘portrait lenses’ – 100–250mm
optics, fast by the standards of the time. Roberts quickly graduated to a formidable 20-inch Grubb
photographic reector, with a special mounting devised by William Huggins. He was soon one of
the most prolic and successful astrophotographers of the age.

Roberts retired in 1888 and shortly afterwards made his masterpiece, one of the classic images of
M31, the Andromeda spiral. He intended to devote his remaining years to astronomy, but
Merseyside smog and bronchitis were defeating him. It was now that Price pounced. A Fellow of the
RAS, he sent his Crowborough book to many affluent scientic retirees, promoting the embryonic
town as a combination of Mount Palomar and Lourdes. Isaac was hooked and through his new
friend found the perfect site for a house and observatory. Quite coincidentally it was Leeson Price’s
property.

A few months later he moved into ‘Stareld’, a Sussex bungalow Uraniborg. Finally demolished in
the 1980s, its name survives in what estate agents call a “small and much favoured residential
development”. Smirking aside, Stareld was rather wonderful – a four acre shambles of domes,
gardens, houses and scientic facilities – while Crowborough was as good a site as could be found in
south-east England.

Which is not saying much. Isaac nonetheless worked constantly. He was perhaps the leading
exponent of amateur astrophotography in Britain until his death on 17 July 1904.

Locked cupboards, real estate and galaxies – Isaac Roberts

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Key moments in astronomy

January 2021

Astronomy Now