Richard Hodgson (1804, in Wimpole Street, Marylebone, Central London – 4 May 1872, in Chingford, Essex) was an English publisher and amateur astronomer.
[3] After a number of years of achieving considerable success in daguerrotypy, he worked on telescopic and microscopic observations.
According to his obituary in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society:[4] In 1852 he built an observatory at Claybury, in Essex, in which a 6-inch refractor was mounted equatorially.
This was afterward moved to Hawkwood, and a transit-room added, which now contains the 4-inch instrument formerly in the possession of Dr. Lee of Hartwell.
In 1854 he designed the diagonal eye-piece for observing the whole of the Sun's disc without contraction of the aperture of the object-glass, a description of which appeared in the Monthly Notices of that year.