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An interesting example of the extremely practical value of such a catalogue came up in connection with Leverrier’s discovery of the planet Neptune. In the autumn of 1846, after the discovery of this planet, Maury ordered one of his observers to trace its path backwards to see if some astronomer had observed it and entered it as a fixed star. On February 1, 1847, the observer, Sears Cook Walker, gave a list of fourteen stars from Lalande’s catalogue in his “Histoire Céleste”, where Neptune should have been approximately in May, 1795. Professor Hubbard was then directed by Maury to examine with the equatorial, and he found on the night of February 4 that the suspected star was missing. It was concluded, therefore, that Lalande had observed and recorded Neptune as a fixed star on the nights of May 8 and 10, 1795. This discovery enabled astronomers to compute the new planet’s orbit from observations extending over a period of fifty years.

The work on this catalogue was carried forward industriously for several years, but the results were not ready to be published in the volume of observations for the year 1846 because of the continual drafts on the personnel of the Observatory for sea duty, which made it impossible for the computers to keep pace with the observers. Eventually, Maury was compelled to abandon the hope of ever finishing a complete catalogue of the stars, as at first planned. The observations continued to be made, however, and by January of 1855 the number of stars which had been so observed reached the grand total of 100,000; but these results were not published until 1873, long after Maury’s superintendency had come to a close. Maury would never have undertaken such an ambitious work, if he had realized the Herculean labor involved in the cataloguing of all the stars down to the 10th magnitude in all the heavens from 45° south to the North Pole, a colossal undertaking that was entirely beyond the capacity of any one observatory to accomplish in a generation.