Karl Wilhelm Valentiner

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Prof. Karl Wilhelm Valentiner

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Johann Valentiner (born February 22, 1845 in Eckernförde , † April 1, 1931 in Berlebeck near Detmold ) was a German astronomer .

Life

Valentiner was the son of the clergyman Friedrich Wilhelm Valentiner and attended the St. Thomas School in Leipzig until 1863 . After graduating as Dr. phil. Valentiner took part in a successful German expedition to observe the passage of Venus on December 9, 1874 in Tschifu ( China ). In 1875 he took over the management of the Mannheim observatory . Since the observation conditions in the Mannheim city center were getting worse, Valentiner moved the observatory to Karlsruhe ( Volkssternwarte Karlsruhe ), which was approved by Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden in 1880 . However, the telescopes had to be temporarily housed in a hut in Karlsruhe's Nymphenpark. Much to the annoyance of Valentiner, who in the meantime had been appointed professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe , no new observatory was built in Karlsruhe because the decision was made to locate it on the Königstuhl near Heidelberg .

After the establishment of the “Grand Ducal Bergsternwarte” (today's State Observatory Heidelberg-Königstuhl ) in 1898, Valentiner took over the department for astrometry , which competed with the astrophysics department under Max Wolf . In 1909 Valentiner retired , after which the two departments were merged under the direction of Wolf. He was also a professor of astronomy at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg .

He was married to Anna Isis Elisabeth, geb. Lepsius (1848–1919), the daughter of Carl Richard Lepsius . The physicist Siegfried Valentiner and the art historian Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner were the couple's sons.

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Individual evidence

  1. a b Richard Sachse, Karl Ramshorn, Reinhart Herz: The teachers of the Thomas School in Leipzig 1832-1912. The high school graduates of the Thomas School in Leipzig 1845–1912 . BG Teubner Verlag, Leipzig 1912, p. 41.