Friedrich Gondolatsch

Friedrich Gondolatsch (around 1962)

Friedrich Peter Max Gondolatsch (born June 3, 1904 in Görlitz , † November 13, 2003 in Heidelberg ) was a German astronomer .

Life

Friedrich Gondolatsch was born on June 3, 1904 as the second son of the music teacher Max Gondolatsch in Görlitz. After three years at the community school, he attended the humanistic grammar school from 1913, where he passed his Abitur examination in 1923. In the same year he began studying astronomy at the University of Leipzig , but moved to Munich a year later, where he studied for a year at the University of Munich and at the Technical University of Munich . In 1925 he moved to the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin, where he received his doctorate on September 27, 1929 with a thesis on "A method for determining the spatial orbit of moving comet tail matter (with application to Halley's comet)". He continued the earlier work of his doctoral supervisor August Kopff , the director of the Astronomical Computing Institute (ARI) in Berlin-Dahlem, and came to the conclusion that a noticeably strong compression in the comet's tail, not as expected, in the orbit plane of the Comet nucleus moving. A more precise explanation for this behavior could not be found at the time. After his apartment was destroyed during the Second World War, he had to move to the small town of Sermuth, where the ARI was relocated. After the end of the war, the institute moved to Heidelberg. Gondolatsch was married for 26 years to Margarethe Gondolatsch, née Fabricius, who died on April 10, 1964.

The asteroid (1562) Gondolatsch is named after him.

plant

activities

Gondolatsch had been employed at the Astronomical Computing Institute as a scientific assistant since May 1, 1927, and then as an assistant from 1928. Even after completing his doctorate, he remained employed by the ARI. At the same time, he worked from 1927 to 1932 with the ephemeris work for the Berlin Astronomical Yearbook, then until 1940 he was busy with the orbital calculation and the ephemeris of small planets. In 1939 he became an observer of the ARI, in the same year his habilitation thesis was published in which he determined the location, the proper motion and the mass ratio of the binary star Alpha Centauri from meridian observations . In 1943 Gondolatsch accepted a lectureship in astronomy at the University of Berlin, from 1945 he taught astronomy as a private lecturer at the University of Heidelberg . It was not until 1956 that he was appointed adjunct professor there. From the summer semester 1950 he also accepted a teaching position for astronomy at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. In 1954 he was only a second choice when a successor to the outgoing director of the ARI, August Kopff, was sought, although he had been vehemently committed to him.

Publications

Gondolatsch worked again for the Berlin Astronomical Yearbook from 1940 until 1957 when it was discontinued. Until his retirement in 1969 he was then editor of the Apparent Places of Fundamental Stars . He also dealt with the kinematics and dynamics of the Milky Way. As early as 1931 he and Leon Hufnagel published a paper on the speed distribution of faint stars. As his main work, however, his co-authorship of the textbook of stellar statistics , which was published in 1937 and was traded as the standard work of galactic research for a long time. He published many articles in professional journals and even brought out entire school books. Gondolatsch was a member of the Astronomical Society (AG) for 73 years.

Web links

• Literature by and about Friedrich Gondolatsch in the catalog of the German National Library
• R. Wielen: Friedrich Gondolatsch † Communications of the Astronomical Society, Vol. 87 (2004), p. 5 (obituary)