Illustrations for Edmund Weiss’s “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt “

Illustrations for Edmund Weiss’s “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt (Stellar Atlas)“, 1888-1892, Verlag von J.F. Schreiber, Stuttgart

Born at Freiwaldau, now Jeseník, a town in the Olomouc Region of the Czech Republic in August of 1837, Edmund Weiss was a professor and astronomer who became the director of the Vienna Observatory in 1878, a post he held until his retirement in 1910.

Born to hydrotherapy pioneer Josef Weiss and his wife, Edmund Weiss was the twin brother of noted botanist Adolf Gustav Weiss, Professor of Botany at Prague. Edmund Weiss spent his early years in Richmond, England where his father was the director of the hydrotherapy center at Stansteadbury in Hertfordshire. After his fathers death in 1847, Josef Weiss returned to his native land where he studied at the Gymnasium in Troppau, now Opava, from 1847 to 1855. He continued his education at the Vienna University with studies in mathematics, astronomy and physics.

On the completion of his studies, Weiss was appointed an assistant at the Vienna Observatory in 1858. While employed at the observatory, he continued his studies and was awarded in 1860 the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. As an assistant, Weiss was a diligent and skilled observer; he was noted for his accuracy in the measurement of a meridian arc during the period of 1864 to 1867. Although offered positions by astronomer Otto Wilhelm von Struve at the Pulkovo Observatory in Petrograd and chemist Adolf von Baeyer at Berlin’s Geodetic Institute, Weiss remained in Vienna where he received the title of honorary professor in 1869 and, in 1875, a full professorship.

In 1872, Edmund Weiss visited England and North America in order to study the leading observatories and new developments in optical works. The knowledge he gained was utilized at the building of a new observatory in the Vienna district of Währing as well as the purchase of its new instruments, among which were the 1882 twenty-seven inch equatorial by Dublin’s Grubb Telescope Company and an eleven three-quarter inch equatorial by Alvan Clark & Sons of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. The construction of the Währing observatory was overseen by its director Karl Ludwig Littrow who died before the observatory’s completion. Weiss was appointed its new Director in 1878 and retained that post until 1910 when he retired with the title Emeritus Director.

The detailed observations at the Währing Observatory were related to the planets, comets, occultations (the concealment of celestial bodies by another), variable stars and meteors. From these studies, Weiss published a large number of papers among which were those that examined the connection between comets and meteors, the meteor swarm of Halley’s Comet, the magnitude of minor planets, the nebulae in the Pleiades, and a method of obtaining True Anomaly and the radius vector of great orbital eccentricity. He published a new edition of astronomer Joseph Johann von Littrow’s popular “Die Wunder des Himmels (The Wonders of Heaven)” and, in 1890, a revised edition of Wilhelm Albrecht Oeltzen’s 1857 astronomical catalogue “Argelander’s Southern Zones”. Weiss also published a pictorial atlas of astronomy in German, the 1888-1892 “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt (Stellar Atlas)”.

Edmund Weiss made multiple journeys to observe astronomical phenomena, particularly eclipses. He observed the 1861 eclipse in Greece, that achieved just total before sunset; the 1867 annular (ring) eclipse from Dalmatia, Croatia; the 1868 total eclipse from Eden, Ireland; the total eclipse of 1870 from Tunis, Tunisia; and the 1874 Transit of Venus, the first of two transits in the nineteenth- century, from Jassy, Romania. These eclipse expeditions led to Weiss’s interest in solar physics and his membership with the International Union for Solar Research.

Weiss developed a high reputation in Vienna as a lecturer on astronomy. He was elected a Fellow of the Vienna Academy in 1878 and an Associate of the Society in 1883. Awarded the Bessemer Gold Medal in 1883, Edmund Weiss died at the age of seventy-nine in June of 1917 after a long and painful illness. He was survived by his wife Adelaide Fenzl and seven children. The “Weiss” lunar crater along the southern edge of the Mare Nubium was named after him.

Notes: It should be noted that Edmund Weiss is not the illustrator for the “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt”. If anyone locates the name of the artist, please make a note in the comment section.

An annular eclipse occurs when the Moon passes directly between the Earth and the Sun but does not completely cover the Sun’s disk, leaving the outer edge visible as a bright ring around the Moon.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Professor and Astronomer Edmund Weiss”, 1872, Vintage Photo

Second Insert Image: Edmund Weiss, Title Illustration, “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt”, 1888-1892, Verlag von J.F. Schreiber, Stuttgart

Bottom Insert Image: Edmund Weiss, “Uppenines at Sunrise”, Illustration for “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt”, 1888-1892, Verlag von J.F. Schreiber, Stuttgart

Calendar: December 12

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of December

The Library’s Leather Armchair

Born at Haggerston, Middlesex in November of 1656, Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist. Very interested in mathematics as a child, he studied at London’s St. Paul’s School where he developed an interest in astronomy. In July of 1673, Halley began studying at Queens’ College, Oxford where he was influenced by the work of the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed’s effort to catalogue the stars of the northern hemisphere. While still an under graduate, he published papers on the solar system and sunspots.

In 1676, Halley published his first paper about planetary orbits. He later dropped out of school to travel to the south Atlantic island of Saint Helena, west of Africa, to observe and chart the stars of the southern hemisphere with cross-references to the northern stars. Supported in his endeavor by King Charles II, he set up an observatory and observed a transit of Mercury across the Sun. From the solar parallax of the planet, he determined it was possible to trigonometrically to determine the distances between the Earth, Venus and the Sun.

Edmond Halley produced his chart of the southern stars and, with the assistance of Charles II, was awarded his Master of Arts degree from Oxford in December of 1678; a few days later, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-two. In September of 1682, Halley conducted a series of observations on what would be known as Halley’s Comet. Because of his work on the orbit, he was able to predict its return in 1758.

In 1691, Halley sought the post of Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. While a candidate, he faced the opposition of both John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, and the Anglican Church which questioned his religious views, specifically because he has questioned the Earth’s age as given in the Bible. Halley, also opposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. was unsuccessful in his attempt.

On December 12th in 1696, Edmond Halley was censured by the Royal Society for suggesting in a 1694 paper. titled “Some Considerations About the Cause of the Universal Deluge”, the story of Noah’s flood in the Bible could be an account of a cometary impact. It should be noted that a similar theory was suggested three centuries later; however, it has generally been rejected by geologists of the present day.

Halley eventually succeeded John Flamsteed as Astronomer Royal in 1720, a position he held until his death in 1742 at the age of eighty-five. He was interred at the old church of St. Margaret’s, Lee Terrace, Blackheath; he lies within the same vault as Astronomer Royal John Pond and close to the unmarked grave of Astronomer Royal Nathaniel Bliss.

Calendar: March 13

Year: Day to Day Men: March 13

Perched

The thirteenth of March in 1930 marks the discovery of Pluto, the ninth largest and tenth most massive known object to directly orbit the sun of this system. Like other objects in the Kulper belt, the circumstellar disc in the outer solar system, Pluto primarily consists of rock and frozen volatiles such as methane, ammonia and water.

In the 1840s, French astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier used Newtonian mechanics to predict the position of the, as yet, undiscovered planet Neptune after analyzing deviations in the orbit of Uranus. Subsequent observations of Neptune in the late 1800s led astronomers to speculate that Uranus’s orbit was being affected by another planet beside Neptune.

In 1906, wealthy astronomer and mathematician Percival Lowell began an extensive project at the Lowell Observatory to search for a possible ninth planet, that he termed Planet X. Lowell and astronomer William H. Pickering had by 1909 suggested several possible celestial coordinates for this Planet X. Lowell continued his search, with calculations established by mathematical genius Elizabeth Langdon Williams, without any success until his death in 1916.

Unknown to Lowell, his research surveys had captured two faint images of Pluto on March 19th and April 7th of 1915; however, these images were not recognized as being of Pluto. There exists fourteen other known observations of Pluto which predate its discovery, the earliest being that of the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory on the 20th of August in 1909.

In 1919, Percival Lowell’s widow, Constance Lowell, entered into a ten-year legal battle with the Lowell Observatory over her husband’s legacy. The search for the unknown planet did not resume until 1929. American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, at the age of twenty-three, continued Lowell’s quest. His task was to systematically image the night sky in pairs of photographs. Each pair would be examined to determine if any objects had shifted position. This was done through the use of a blink comparator that shifts back and forth between photographs to create the illusion of movement for any object that had changed position in the photographs.

On the 18th of February in 1930, after a year of searching, Tombaugh detected a possible moving object on the photographic plates taken on January 23rd and 29th. A photograph of lesser quality taken on the 21st helped confirm the movement. After the Lowell Observatory had taken additional photographs to confirm the discovery, a telegram with the news was sent to the Harvard College Observatory on the 13th of March in 1930.

The name Pluto came from the Roman god of the underworld; it is also an epithet for Hades, the Greek equivalent of Pluto. As one Plutonian year corresponds to 247.94 Earth years, Pluto will be back in the same position of its discovery in 2178. On the twenty-ninth of July in 2005, astronomers at Caltech announced the discovery of a new trans-Neptunian object, named Eris, which is substantially more massive than Pluto and the most massive object discovered in the solar system since Neptune’s moon, Triton, in 1846.

Calendar: March 7

Year: Day to Day Men: March 7

Gold Pinstripes

The seventh of March in the year 1837 marks the birth date of American physician and amateur astronomer Henry Draper. Both a professor and Dean of Medicine at City University of New York, he was one of the pioneers in the field of astrophotography.

Born to John William Draper, a professor at New York University, and Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, daughter of the royal physician to the Emperor of Brazil, Henry Draper completed all his medical courses at the City University of New York’s School of Medicine by the age of twenty. Too young to graduate, he toured Europe for a year and became acquainted with the work of Irish astronomer William Parsons, Third Earl of Rosse. Draper’s interest in photography and the Earl of Rosse’s observatory would later become the basis of his career.

On his return from Europe, Draper received his Medical Degree and began working as a physician at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital. In 1860, he received appointment at the City University of New York as Professor of Natural Science. Draper joined the Twelfth New York Infantry Regiment’s S Company in May of 1862 as a surgeon during the Civil War. His brother, John Christopher Draper, joined him as an assistant surgeon; they served together as surgeons until October in 1862. Draper became Chairman of the Department of Physiology at City University in 1866.

Henry Draper met Mary Anna Palmer, the daughter of Connecticut merchant and real estate investor Courtlandt Palmer, and married her in 1867. A well-educated woman, Mary Anna Draper collaborated with her husband in his expeditions, research and photography. Upon her father’s death in 1872, she became heir, along with her three brothers, to her father’s fortune. Henry and Mary Anna Draper relocated to their summer home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where they constructed an observatory with a 71 cm (28 inch) reflecting telescope and began a fifteen-year research partnership.

Interested in the application of photography to astronomy, Draper started making daguerrotypes of the sun and moon; however in 1872, he succeeded for the first time in photographing the stellar spectrum of the star Vega. Draper discovered in 1879 that the newly developed dry-photographic plates were more sensitive and convenient than the older wet-collodion ones. By 1882 with the use of the newer photographic plates, he was able to obtain over a hundred stellar spectra images, including those of the Moon, Mars, Jupiter (1880) and the Orion Nebula. Draper also succeeded in directly photographing the Orion Nebula, first in September of 1880 with a fifty-minute exposure and later with a one hundred-forty minute exposure though the use of a more accurate clock-driven telescope.

In 1882, Henry Draper resigned from City University to concentrate on his astrophotographic work for which he hoped to obtain higher resolution images. On the twentieth of November in 1882, Draper suffered an untimely death at the age of forty-five from double pleurisy, an inflammation of the membranes that surround the lungs and line the chest cavity.

After his death, Mary Anna Draper funded the Henry Draper Award of the National Academy of Sciences for outstanding contributions to astrophysics. She founded the Henry Draper Memorial Fund which financed the famous Henry Draper Catalogue, a nine-volume collection published between 1918 and 1924 that contains spectra details of two hundred twenty-five thousand stars. Draper’s donations enabled astronomer Edward Charles Pickering to continue his classification of stars based on their spectra. She also funded the construction of the Mount Wilson Observatory as well as ongoing research at the Harvard Observatory.