Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Temple

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Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Temple

Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel (born  December 4, 1821 in Niedercunnersdorf , Saxony , †  March 16, 1889 in Arcetri , Italy ) was a German astronomer and lithographer . Among other things, he discovered five asteroids and twelve comets .

Life

From 1837 on, Tempel learned the trade of the lithographer in Meißen . From 1840 onwards he embarked on a journey of several years, which took him to the cities of Copenhagen , Stockholm and Christiania (now Oslo ), among others .

In 1858 he settled in Venice as a freelance lithographer and married. His lithographs and drawings were valued for their attention to detail, and so he worked for botanists and other natural scientists.

Tempel, who had been interested in astronomy since his school days , acquired a four-inch refractor in 1858 . With this rather modest instrument by today's standards, he discovered a comet and a reflection nebula in the Pleiades in 1859 (see illustration). The latter discovery was initially doubted because the Pleiades had been closely observed without the faint nebula having been discovered by then.

Due to his lack of academic training, Tempel was viewed as an amateur astronomer . He did not get a job in Germany. He was also denied the right to name the heavenly bodies he discovered. Because of his achievements, he received a call to the Imperial Observatory of Marseille in 1860 and thus also the privilege of naming objects. In the period that followed he discovered five asteroids and twelve comets, including the Tempel-Tuttle comet .

After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, he was expelled from the country and returned to Italy. In 1875 he took over the management of the recently built observatory in Arcetri , south of Florence . The refractor installed there was the largest telescope in Italy with an aperture of 283 mm and a focal length of 5370 mm. With this instrument he examined foggy objects. In 1885 his publication About Nebulae appeared in Prague - after observations made in the years 1876–1879 with the refractor by Amici at the royal observatory at Arcetri near Florence .

Honors

Temple in Marseille

Tempel has received several awards for his achievements in the field of astronomy. In his memory the 40 km large moon crater temple and the asteroid (3808) temple were named after him. Several of the comets he discovered bear his name, including comet Tempel 1 , which was the target of NASA's Deep Impact mission in 2005 .

Prizes and awards

Naming

  • 1898: Mondkrater Tempel (discoverer: Johann Nepomuk Krieger )
  • 1971: A memorial stone is erected in his birthplace in Niedercunnersdorf
  • 1988: Planetoid (3808) Temple (discoverer: Freimut Börngen )
  • 1990: Wilhelm-Tempel-Schule in Niedercunnersdorf

Discoveries

Temple drawing of the reflection nebula Merope ( NGC 1435 )

Asteroids

Comets

Periodic comets

Non-periodic comets

  • April 2, 1859: C / 1859 G1
  • October 24, 1860: C / 1860 U1 (1860 IV)
  • November 5, 1863: C / 1863 V1 (1863 IV)
  • July 5, 1864: C / 1864 N1 (1864 II)
  • March 22, 1868–1868 I.
  • October 12, 1869: C / 1869 T1 (1869 II)
  • May 29, 1870: C / 1870 K1 (1870 I, with Friedrich August Theodor Winnecke )
  • June 14, 1871: C / 1871 L1 (1871 II)
  • November 3, 1871: C / 1871 V1 (1871 IV)

reception

Inspired by the Georgian author, painter and publisher Iliazd , Max Ernst created the artist book Maximiliana, ou l'exercice illégal de l'astronomie , published in 1964 by Iliazd in Paris. Max Ernst created graphics with surrealistic celestial bodies as an homage to the astronomer.

Together with Max Ernst, Peter Schamoni made a short film about Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel in 1966, entitled The Illegal Practice of Astronomy . The twelve-minute film won several awards.

literature

Web links

Commons : Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Minor Planet Discoverers
  2. Information about the film on the homepage of Peter Schamoni ( Memento from August 30, 2006 in the Internet Archive )