Maurice Loewy

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Maurice Loewy around 1900

Maurice Loewy (born April 15, 1833 in Vienna , † October 15, 1907 in Paris ) was an Austro-French astronomer and observatory director. In addition to celestial mechanics and astrometry , he dealt with a. with selenography and published the Paris photographic moon atlas .

Life

He was born as Moritz Loewy. His Jewish parents moved in 1841 to Vienna , to the anti-Semitism to escape in her hometown. Loewy became an assistant at the Vienna University Observatory, where he devoted himself to celestial mechanics . As a prerequisite for a professorship, however, the Austrian minister of education asked von Thun to be baptized. The director of the observatory at the time, Karl Ludwig von Littrow , placed Loewy in a position in the Paris observatory in 1860 . In France , Loewy then took on French citizenship.

He dealt with the orbits of asteroids and planets and the measurement of geographical longitudes, thus improving the accuracy of the Connaissance des temps , the official astronomical yearbook in France. Furthermore, he worked on topics of optics , the aberration of light and constructed a long focal length Coudé equatorial reflector telescope, with which his assistant Pierre Puiseux took over 6000 images of the moon.

In 1872 Loewy was appointed to the Bureau des Longitudes , the French institute for astronomical time and length determination . In 1873 he became a member of the Paris Académie des Sciences , in 1901 of the National Academy of Sciences .

In December 1895 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences .

In 1896 Loewy became director of the Paris Observatory, he reorganized the institution and set up the department for physical astronomy. For more than ten years, he worked with Pierre Puiseux (1855–1928) on an Atlas of the Moon - composed of 10,000 photographs, most of which were taken at the Loewy Equatorial . Your Atlas photographique de la Lune (1910) served as the basis for mapping the moon for more than half a century . In addition, Loewy engaged in international project Carte du Ciel , a but never quite finished photographic sky map - screening .

Maurice Loewy died of cardiac arrest in Paris in 1907 .

Honors

Fonts (selection)

  • Bahn des Cometen V 1858 , KK Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, Vienna 1858
  • Determination of the orbit of the first comets in 1857 , KK Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, Vienna 1859
  • Loewy & Puiseux: Paris Moon Atlas in 48 photographs, Paris 1896
  • Loewy & Puiseux: Atlas photographique de la Lune (12 parts, 1910), in Google Books.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to research by Anneliese Schnell: Maurice Loewy and the equatorial Coudé in Vienna , Astronomische Nachrichten, Vol. 330, Issue 6, pp. 552–554, doi : 10.1002 / asna.200911215 , bibcode : 2009AN .... 330 .. 552S , Vienna was the place of birth, because u. a. this is stated in a French translation of his birth certificate. Vienna as the place of birth is also mentioned in the obituaries, most major reference books and other sources; some sources apparently wrongly give Pressburg or Marienbad .
  2. ^ Salomon Wininger: Great Jewish National Biography , Vol. IV, p. 178
  3. ^ Members of the previous academies. Maurice Loewy. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , accessed April 30, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Loewy, Maurice
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1833
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH October 15, 1907
Place of death Paris