Edward Joshua Cooper

Edward Joshua Cooper was born in Saint Stephen's Green, County Dublin, in May 1798, before he carried a brass telescope across foreign continents and forced a distant planet into human knowledge. The boy who measured latitude in Egypt and Norway later built Markree Observatory, where the largest refracting lens of the 1830s turned toward the heavens and an assistant named a new world Metis. Cooper also sat in Parliament, but the stars gave his life more shape than politics did.