He was born at Armagh, in Ireland, 5 July 1826, was engaged at the age of sixteen as a calculator at Greenwich, and exchanged the post for that of assistant in the Cambridge Observatory in August 1846.
After twelve years' zealous cooperation with James Challis, he resigned his appointment towards the close of 1858,[1] and cultivated literature in Paris until 1860, when he went to Spain, and observed the total solar eclipse of July 18, 1860 at Camuesa, with Messrs. Wray and Buckingham of the Himalaya expedition.
In the following year, after some months in Switzerland, he settled in London, and devoted himself to literary and linguistic studies, reading much at the British Museum, and contributing regularly, but for the most part anonymously, to the Popular Science Review and other periodicals.
He had made arrangements for the publication of a work on stars, nebulae, and clusters, of which two sheets were already printed, when his strength finally gave way before the ravages of slow consumption.
He calculated the orbit of the double star ξ Ursæ Majoris, assigning it a period of 63.14 years, as well as those of Petersen's third (1850) and Brorsen's (1851, iii.)