Alexander Alexandrovich Mikhailov (astronomer)
Alexander Alexandrowitsch Michailow , Russian Александр Александрович Михайлов , English transcription Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Mikhailov, (born April 26, 1888 in Morschansk , † September 29, 1983 in Leningrad ) was a Russian astronomer.
Life
Mikhailov studied at Lomonosov University and received a gold medal upon graduation in 1911. From 1918 to 1947 he was professor of astronomy at Lomonosov University, and from 1919 he also taught geodesy at the Moscow Geodesy Institute.
From 1947 to 1982 he was at the Pulkovo Observatory in Leningrad (the observatory of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the most famous Russian observatory) and was director there until 1964. He directed its reconstruction after its destruction in World War II (reopened in 1954). In the 1950s he observed, among other things, solar activity and dealt with the then new radio astronomy. In 1959 he was involved in the Lunik 3 mission to the moon. He was one of the most famous Russian astronomers in the 1950s and 1960s (with many contacts abroad) and was the author of well-known Russian textbooks on astronomy. He also wrote popular scientific works on astronomy and endeavored to popularize them and dealt with the history of astronomy. From 1946 to 1948 he was Vice President of the International Astronomical Union . He died in his apartment at the Pulkovo Observatory.
His fields of work included astrometry, stellar astronomy, gravimetry and the theory of the earth figure, map projections, space exploration including the moon, theory of eclipses (one of his main interests) and observation of eclipses (for which he developed apparatus and took part in many expeditions). In particular, he tried to measure the light deflection predicted by Albert Einstein in the sun's gravitational field. This was also the subject of his Darwin Lecture before the Royal Astronomical Society in 1959.
The first edition of his star atlas appeared in 1913 and he worked on detailed star atlases until old age.
He had been married to the astronomer Zdenka J. Kadla since 1946, with whom he had a son.
In 1959 he became a member of the Leopoldina and in 1964 a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences . In 1978 he became a hero of socialist labor . In his honor the asteroid (1910) Mikhailov was named. As a hobby he collected photographic equipment and he translated foreign scientific literature into Russian.
Fonts
- Theory of solar eclipses (Russian), 1925
- Lecture on gravimetry and the theory of the earth figure (Russian), Moscow 1939
- Theory of Eclipses (Russian), Moscow 1945
- with Z. Lerman, BA Vorontsov-Veliaminov, VP Viazanitsyn: A course in astrophysics and stellar astronomy, Israel Program for Scientific Translations, Volume 2 1969, Volume 3 (Physics of the Solar System) 1966
- Radio Astronomy, Israel Program for Technical Translations, Jerusalem 1967
- with others: An atlas of the moon's far side: the Lunik III reconnaissance, Interscience 1961
literature
- Alexander Gurshtein, Virginia Trimble Entry, Thomas Hockey u. a. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, Springer 2007, p. 781, Google Books
- Obituary in Soviet Astronomy, Volume 28, 1984, p. 243
Individual evidence
- ↑ Member entry of Aleksandr A. Michajlov at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on June 18, 2017.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Mikhailov, Alexander Alexandrovich |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Михайлов, Александр Александрович (Russian) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Russian astronomer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 26, 1888 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Morshansk |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 29, 1983 |
| Place of death | St. Petersburg |