Charles Edward Burton (16 September 1846 - 9 July 1882) was a British-born Irish astronomer. Early life He was born to Irish parents in Barnton, Cheshire, where his father, Reverend Edward. W. Burton, held a church benefice. Suffering from ill-health, he was privately educated. By the age of 15 he had become very interested in astronomy, experimenting with celestial photography. The family returned to Ireland, where Rev. Burton was appointed curate of Rathmichael Church, Loughlinstown, Co.Dublin. Career He joined Lawrence Parsons's (Lord Rosse) observatory in February 1868 as an assistant astronomer, using a small transit telescope and learning to grind mirrors up to 15 inches (38 cm) in diameter for telescopes; in the 1840s, William Parsons (3rd Earl) had built the world's largest telescope at Parsonstown (Birr from 1899), a 72-inch (183 cm) reflector. The mirrors ground by Burton were regarded as beyond compare. Later in 1868, Burton gained a B.A. from Trinity College, University of Dublin. He resigned his post as Rosse's assistant on account of poor health in March 1869. The following year, he went on the expedition to Augusta (also Austa/Agosta), Sicily, to observe the total solar eclipse of 22 December, and he read his paper about the event on 13 February 1871 to the Royal Irish Academy. Between 1870 and 1874, he reported from ten observations of the shadow of the Jovian moon Ganymede that the shadows appeared to be more elongated than one might expect. He travelled, in the role of a photographer, on one of the five official British expeditions to observe the transit of Venus in 1874, his expedition being to the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean, near Mauritius. Using a 12-inch (30 cm) silvered-glass reflector that he had built, he observed nebulae only visible from the southern hemisphere. He spent nearly a year at the Greenwich Observatory taking measurements of the photographic plates of the transit, followed by two years at Dunsink Observatory near Dublin, again retiring because of ill-health in August 1878. His observations of the transit led him to suggest that the fuzzy limb apparent in the imaging of Venus was evidence of a planetary atmosphere. He continued to work from his father's parsonage at Loughlinstown, Co. Dublin where he built his own observatory with 8-inch (20 cm) and 12-inch reflectors. In 1879, with Mars at its closest point to Earth (in opposition, he validated Giovanni Schiaparelli's 1877