Pierre Puiseux

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pierre Puiseux

Pierre Henri Puiseux (* 20th July 1855 in Paris ; † 28. September 1928 ) was a French , partly as a geologist active astronomer . He was best known for the first photographic lunar atlas .

The son of mathematician Victor Puiseux attended the École normal supérieure before starting work as an astronomer at the Paris Observatory in 1885 .

He initially dealt with the aberration of light, with celestial mechanics (especially the orbital movements of asteroids ) and the topography of the moon . In collaboration with the later director of the observatory, Maurice Loewy, and other observatories, he also worked on the (never fully completed) photographic sky survey Carte du Ciel . He earned lasting fame through the Paris Moon Atlas (1896) and the Atlas photographique de la Lune of 1910, which were the standard works of selenography and moon mapping for over 50 years . He and Loewy took more than 6,000 photographs of the moon for them.

In 1896, Puiseux received the Lalande Prize of the Paris Academy of Sciences ( Académie des Sciences ) and in 1900 the Jules Janssen Prize . In 1912 he became an academician in the astronomy section.

Like his father, he loved mountaineering . In addition to many other peaks, he climbed Mont Blanc single-handedly. On these occasions he studied the geology of mountains and used this knowledge for his theories about the formation of the lunar surface. He published comparisons with terrestrial landforms and geological structures in 1908 in his work "La terre et la lune: forme extérieure et structure internal".

The moon crater Puiseux is named after the researcher . It lies on the edge of the Mare Humorum , exactly opposite the Loewy crater.

Web links

  • A. Collard: Un astronome français. Pierre Puiseux (1855-1928). Ciel et Terre, vol. 47 (1931). Bulletin of the Société Belge d'Astronomie, Brussels, Part 1: pp. 14-24 , Part 2: pp. 60-68 (obituary, French)
  • GC Flammarion: Pierre Puiseux. L'Astronomie, vol. 42 (1928), pp. 521-525 (obituary, French)
  • JJ: Pierre Puiseux. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 89 (1929), pp. 327–328 (obituary, English)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Pierre Henri Puiseux: La terre et la lune: forme extérieure et structure internal Gauthier-Villars, 1908. Google Books, accessed on July 17, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Puiseux, Pierre
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Puiseux, Pierre Henri (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1855
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH September 28, 1928