Joseph-Nicolas Delisle

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Joseph Nicolas Delisle
Delisle moon crater (top) and Diophantus (bottom) image from Apollo 15

Joseph-Nicolas Delisle [ dəˈlil ] (born April 4, 1688 in Paris , † September 11, 1768 ibid) was a French astronomer and cartographer . He was the son of the historian and geographer Claude Delisle and the younger brother of the cartographer Guillaume Delisle . In addition to the Paris observatory, he also worked in St. Petersburg.

Life and scientific achievement

Delisle became a member of the Paris Academy as early as 1714 , still as a student with Giacomo Filippo Maraldi . In 1715 he observed a wave-optical effect, which was largely forgotten and was only theoretically derived more than a hundred years later at the French Académie des Sciences by Augustin-Jean Fresnel , predicted by Siméon Denis Poisson , experimentally proven by François Arago and which today is mostly known as Poisson spot is called.

In 1725 Delisle was appointed as an academic by Tsar Peter the Great to Saint Petersburg , where he founded a school for astronomy and there in 1747 became an honorary foreign member of the Academy of Sciences . He observed the eclipses of Jupiter's moons in Saint Petersburg and published his results. He was particularly noticeable for the fact that he copied, collected and organized extensive data, correspondence and manuscripts. For this he received a salary and the title of "Navy astronomer". On December 14, 1725, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle with the academic surname Archimedes I was elected a member ( matriculation no. 384 ) of the Leopoldina .

Delisle suggested the refraction of sunlight by water droplets in clouds as an explanation for the rainbow . He also worked on the calculation of the Sun-Earth distance by evaluating the observations of the Mercury and Venus passages . He created a graduation of temperature , which is named after him, the Delisle scale .

In 1747 he returned to Paris, where he was involved as chief of Charles Messier at the naval observatory in the search for Halley's Comet .

On September 11, 1768 he died poor and forgotten in a monastery in his hometown.

Honor

The lunar crater Delisle was named after him. The name of Mons Delisle on the moon is derived from this.

The asteroid (12742) Delisle was named after him and his brother Guillaume .

literature

Web links

Commons : Joseph-Nicolas Delisle  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joseph-Nicolas Delisle: Reflexions in: Mémoires de l'Académie Royale des Sciences , 1715, p. 166
  2. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Ossip Nikolajewitsch (Joseph-Nicolas) Delisle. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed August 25, 2015 (Russian).
  3. Member entry of Joseph-Nicolas Delisle at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on August 9, 2018.
  4. see Messier biography