Admiral William H Smyth was a navy commander in the Napoleonic wars who retired from the navy in 1825. On his retirement he spent a considerable sum and purchased what was then the finest telescope in amateur hands in the UK, a six inch refractor that was installed in the observatory at his home in Bedford. Over the next decade he used this telescope to compile a list of observations on many celestial objects such as nebulae and double stars.

These observations formed the basis of a charming observing guide called  a cycle of celestial objects, originally in 3 volumes. The second volume of this has been published in facsimile by Willmann-Bell as the Bedford catalogue with a foreword by George Lovi. This makes Smyths’ observations available but unfortunately it is far from usable as a direct observing guide because of the inaccurate positions of many objects due to precession and also recategorisation of many constellations. This aside the catalogue offers a lot of promise for amateur observations becasue:

1. Unlike the Messier list which was famously observed from Paris, this list was compiled of objects that are observable reasonably high in the sky from higher latitude areas such as England and more northern continental USA.

2. The list does not restrict itself to one type of object nor to purely deep sky objects but has a varied selection of stars, double stars, clusters, asterisms and ‘nebulae’ (including in fact galaxies and nebulae). This provides an interesting variety and, for me at least, has reminded me of how nice it is to observe objects that are not just ‘faint fuzzies’.

3. The objects were all observed using a small, by modern standards,  telescope. This makes the range of objects in the catalogue ideal for visual observation with common amateur telescopes today. A 8 inch catadioptic scope or a small high quality refractor would provide good views of many of the objects while several, particularly the double stars, are optimally observed with a 4 inch refractor which is ideal for the sort of minimal astronomy explored on the Minimalstar website. In terms of imaging, every object in the catalogue can relatively easily be imaged using a small refractor and lightweight minimalist ccd using short exposure times. The catalogue is thus easily accessible.

The Bedford Catalogue therefore represents a really good observing program for both visual use or imaging with a minimalist setup but because of the changes in coordinates and object categorisation the catalogue is hard to use as it stands. My proposed solution to this is discusssed in the section, A modern Bedford.