Charles Piazzi Smyth (January 3, 1819 – February 21, 1900), was Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1846 to 1888, well-known for many innovations in astronomy and his pyramidological and metrological studies of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Charles Piazzi Smyth was born in Naples, Italy to Admiral William Henry Smyth and his wife Annarelia. He was called Piazzi after his godfather, the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, whose acquaintance his father...
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Charles Piazzi Smyth (January 3, 1819 – February 21, 1900), was Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1846 to 1888, well-known for many innovations in astronomy and his pyramidological and metrological studies of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Charles Piazzi Smyth was born in Naples, Italy to Admiral William Henry Smyth and his wife Annarelia. He was called Piazzi after his godfather, the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, whose acquaintance his father had made at Palermo when serving in the Mediterranean. His father subsequently settled at Bedford and equipped there an observatory, at which Piazzi Smyth received his first lessons in astronomy. At the age of sixteen he became an assistant to Sir Thomas Maclear at the Cape of Good Hope, where he observed Halley's comet and the Great Comet of 1843, and took an active part in the verification and extension of Nicolas Louis de Lacaille's arc of the meridian.
In 1845 he was appointed Astronomer Royal for Scotland, based at the Calton Hill...
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