PRITCHARD, CHARLES (1808-1893), British astron omer, was born at Alberbury, Shropshire, on Feb. 29, 1808. He was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, elected a fellow of his college in 1832, and became a schoolmaster. On his retire ment in 1862 he settled at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, and took an active interest in the affairs of the Royal Astronomical Society, of which he became honorary secretary in 1862 and president in 1866. In 1870 he was elected Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford. At his request the university determined to erect a fine equatorial telescope for the instruction of his class and for purposes of research, a scheme which, in consequence of Warren de la Rue's munificent gift of instruments from his private observatory at Cranford, expanded into the establishment of the new university observatory. By de la Rue's advice, Pritchard began his career there with a determination of the physical libra tion of the moon, or the nutation of its axis. In 1882 Pritchard commenced a systematic study of stellar photometry. For this purpose he employed the "wedge photometer" (see PHOTOMETRY, CELESTIAL, and Mem. R.A.S. xlvii. 353), with which he measured the relative brightness of 2,784 stars between the North Pole and about -- o° declination.
The results were published in 1885 in his Uranometria Nova Oxoniensis, and their importance was recognized by the bestowal in 1886 upon him, conjointly with Pickering, of the Royal Astronomical Society's gold medal. He applied photography to the determination of stellar parallax, publishing the results of his systematic measurement of the parallaxes of second-magnitude stars, in the third and fourth volumes of the Publications of the Oxford University Observatory. When the great scheme of an international survey of the heavens was projected, the zone between 25° and 31° north declination was allotted to him, and at the time of his death some progress had been made in recording its included stars. Pritchard became F.R.S. in 1840 and received many scientific honours. He died on May 28, 1893.
See Proc. Roy. Soc. liv. 3 ; Month. Notices, Roy. Astr. Soc. liv. 198; W. E. Plummer, Observatory, xvi. 256 (portrait) ; Astr. and Astro physics, xii. 592 ; J. Foster, Oxford Men and their Colleges, p. 206; Charles Pritchard, D.D., Memoirs of his Life, by Ada Pritchard (London, 1897).