William Wales (astronomer)

William Wales (1734? – 29 December 1798) was a British mathematician and astronomer.

Wales was born around 1734 to John and Sarah Wales and was baptised in Warmfield (near the West Yorkshire town of Wakefield) that year. As a youth, according to the historian John Cawte Beaglehole, Wales travelled south in the company of a Mr Holroyd, who became a plumber in the service of George III. By the mid-1760s, Wales was contributing to The Ladies' Diary. In 1765 he married Mary Green, sister of the astronomer Charles Green.

In 1765, Wales was employed by the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne as a computer, calculating ephemerides that could be used to establish the longitude of a ship, for Maskelyne's Nautical Almanac.

As part of the plans of the Royal Society to make observations of the June 1769 transit of Venus, which would lead to an accurate determination of the astronomical unit (the distance between the Earth and the Sun), Wales and an assistant, Joseph Dymond, were sent to Prince of Wales Fort on Hudson Bay to observe the transit, with the pair being offered a reward of £200 for a successful conclusion to their expedition. Other Royal Society expeditions associated with the 1769 transit were Cook's First voyage to the Pacific, with observations of the transit being made at Tahiti, and the expedition of Jeremiah Dixon and William Bayly to Norway.

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