Strasbourg Observatory
The Observatory of Strasbourg is an astronomical observatory in Strasbourg, France. Following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the city of Strasbourg became part of the German Empire. The University of Strasbourg was refounded in 1872 and a new observatory began construction in 1875 in the Neustadt (Strasbourg), Neustadt district. The main instrument was a 50 cm Repsold refractor, which saw first light (astronomy), first light in 1880 (see Great refractor). At the time this was the largest instrument in the German Empire. In 1881, the ninth General Assembly of the Astronomische Gesellschaft met in Strasbourg to mark the official inauguration. The observatory site was selected primarily for instruction purposes and political symbolism, rather than the observational qualities. It was a low-lying site that was prone to mists. During the period up until 1914, the staff was too small to work the instruments and so there was little academic research published prior to Worl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Jardin Botanique De L'Université De Strasbourg
The Jardin Botanique de l'Université de Strasbourg (3.5 hectares), also known as the Jardin botanique de Strasbourg and the Jardin botanique de l'Université Louis Pasteur, is a botanical garden and arboretum located at 28 rue Goethe, Strasbourg, Bas-Rhin, Alsace, France. It is open daily without charge. The garden was established in 1619 for the city's Académie (which in 1621 became the university) and is thus the second oldest botanical garden in France after that of Montpellier. It was created on the cemetery grounds of the convent Saint-Nicolas-aux-Ondes. This first site was then known as the Krutenau (plain of cabbage), and is now the Place de l'Ecole des Arts Decoratifs. This early garden was kept by the faculty of medicine. Its first inventory, published in 1670 by Marcus Mappus, listed some 1600 species. The entire university was suppressed in 1792 after the French Revolution, but the garden's director, Jean Hermann, managed to preserve not just the garden itself but ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Nebula
A nebula ('cloud' or 'fog' in Latin; pl. nebulae, nebulæ or nebulas) is a distinct luminescent part of interstellar medium, which can consist of ionized, neutral or molecular hydrogen and also cosmic dust. Nebulae are often star-forming regions, such as in the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula. In these regions, the formations of gas, dust, and other materials "clump" together to form denser regions, which attract further matter, and eventually will become dense enough to form stars. The remaining material is then thought to form planets and other planetary system objects. Most nebulae are of vast size; some are hundreds of light-years in diameter. A nebula that is visible to the human eye from Earth would appear larger, but no brighter, from close by. The Orion Nebula, the brightest nebula in the sky and occupying an area twice the angular diameter of the full Moon, can be viewed with the naked eye but was missed by early astronomers. Although denser than the space ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Ernest Esclangon
Ernest Benjamin Esclangon (17 March 1876 – 28 January 1954) was a French astronomer and mathematician. Born in Mison, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, in 1895 he started to study mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure, graduating in 1898. Looking for some means of financial support while he completed his doctorate on quasi-periodic functions, he took a post at the Bordeaux Observatory, teaching some mathematics at the university. During World War I, he worked on ballistics and developed a novel method for precisely locating enemy artillery. When a gun is fired, it initiates a spherical shock wave but the projectile also generates a conical wave. By using the sound of distant guns to compare the two waves, Escaglon was able to make accurate predictions of gun locations. After the armistice in 1919, Esclangon became director of the Strasbourg Observatory and professor of astronomy at the university the following year. In 1929, he was appointed director of the Paris Observat ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
William Lewis Elkin
William Lewis Elkin (April 29, 1855 – May 30, 1933) was an American astronomer known for his detailed work measuring parallaxes and for pioneering work in meteor photography. He served as director of the Yale University Observatory from 1896 to 1910. Early life and education He was born in New Orleans to Jane and Lewis Elkin, one of five children but the only one to survive to adulthood. Following the death of her husband in 1867, Jane travelled abroad for the following seventeen years, taking along William. As a result of a broad education, he learned to speak fluently in German and French, and acquired a basic understanding of Italian and Spanish. He also received a broad knowledge of music from many nations, and would retain a deep love of music for the remainder of his life. He became seriously ill in 1870, possibly from dysentery, and thereafter he would suffer health problems for the remainder of his life. In 1872 he joined the Royal Polytechnic School in Stuttgart, Ger ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
André-Louis Danjon
André-Louis Danjon (; 6 April 1890 – 21 April 1967) was a French astronomer born in Caen to Louis Dominique Danjon and Marie Justine Binet. Danjon devised a method to measure "earthshine" on the Moon using a telescope in which a prism split the Moon's image into two identical side-by-side images. By adjusting a diaphragm to dim one of the images until the sunlit portion had the same apparent brightness as the earthlit portion on the unadjusted image, he could quantify the diaphragm adjustment, and thus had a real measurement for the brightness of earthshine. He recorded the measurements using his method (now known as the Danjon scale, on which zero equates to a barely visible Moon) from 1925 until the 1950s. Among his notable contributions to astronomy was the design of the impersonal (prismatic) astrolabe based on an earlier prismatic astrolabe developed by François Auguste Claude which is now known as the Danjon astrolabe, which led to an improvement in the accuracy ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Adolf Berberich
Adolf Joseph Berberich (16 November 1861 – 27 April 1920) was a German astronomer best known for his work on calculating the orbits of minor planets and double stars. The minor planet 776 Berbericia was named in his honour. Early life Adolf Berberich was born on 16 November 1861 in Überlingen, Baden, to Katharina Hirt and Michael, a postman in Rastatt. From 1871 – 1880 he attended a gymnasium in Rastatt and then went on to study astronomy at the University of Strasbourg until 1884, during which his family reportedly encountered serious financial difficulties. During his time there, he found himself unsatisfied by the insufficient funding for astronomy, which he blamed partly on Friedrich Winnecke and Wilhelm Schur, who headed the astronomy department and directed the Strasbourg observatory. Berberich originally planned to devote himself to the study of observational astronomy, but severe myopia, or near-sightedness, forced him to turn to theoretical astronomy. Career ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Julius Bauschinger
Julius Bauschinger (January 28, 1860 – January 21, 1934) was a German astronomer. Biography Julius Bauschinger was born in Fürth, the son of the physicist Johann Bauschinger. He studied at the Universities of Munich and Berlin, graduating under the direction of Hugo Hans von Seeliger with a thesis titled "Studies on the motion of the planet Mercury" (1884). In 1882, he was part of a German expedition to Hartford, Connecticut, in order to observe the transit of Venus. From 1883 he was assistant and observer at the Munich observatory. In 1896 he was named director of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut and professor of theoretical astronomy in Berlin, a position he held until 1909, when he became director of the Strasbourg observatory. Bauschinger was dissertation advisor for Alfred Wegener's 1905 doctoral thesis in astronomy. From 1920 to 1930 he directed the Leipzig observatory. He died in Munich in 1934. References The minor planet 2306, discovered in 1939, has bee ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Theodolite
A theodolite () is a precision optical instrument for measuring angles between designated visible points in the horizontal and vertical planes. The traditional use has been for land surveying, but it is also used extensively for building and infrastructure construction, and some specialized applications such as meteorology and rocket launching. It consists of a moveable telescope mounted so it can rotate around horizontal and vertical axes and provide angular readouts. These indicate the orientation of the telescope, and are used to relate the first point sighted through the telescope to subsequent sightings of other points from the same theodolite position. These angles can be measured with accuracies down to microradians or seconds of arc. From these readings a plan can be drawn, or objects can be positioned in accordance with an existing plan. The modern theodolite has evolved into what is known as a total station where angles and distances are measured electronically, and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Crypt
A crypt (from Latin ''crypta'' "vault") is a stone chamber beneath the floor of a church or other building. It typically contains coffins, sarcophagi, or religious relics. Originally, crypts were typically found below the main apse of a church, such as at the Abbey of Saint-Germain en Auxerre, but were later located beneath chancel, naves and transepts as well. Occasionally churches were raised high to accommodate a crypt at the ground level, such as St Michael's Church in Hildesheim, Germany. Etymology The word "Crypt" developed as an alternative form of the Latin "vault" as it was carried over into Late Latin, and came to refer to the ritual rooms found underneath church buildings. It also served as a vault for storing important and/or sacred items. The word "Crypta", however, is also the female form of ''crypto'' "hidden". The earliest known origin of both is in the Ancient Greek '' κρύπτω'' (krupto/krypto), the first person singular indicative of the verb "to conc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Aladin Sky Atlas
Aladin is an interactive software sky atlas, created in France. It's allowing the user to visualize digitized astronomical images, superimpose entries from astronomical catalogues or databases, and interactively access related data and information from the SIMBAD database, the VizieR service and other archives for all known sources in the field. Created in 1999, Aladin has become a widely used VO portal capable of addressing challenges such as locating data of interest, accessing and exploring distributed datasets, visualizing multi-wavelength data. Compliance with existing or emerging VO standards, interconnection with other visualisation or analysis tools, ability to easily compare heterogeneous data are key topics allowing Aladin to be a powerful data exploration and integration tool as well as a science enabler. Aladin is developed and maintained by the Centre de données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) and released under the GNU GPL v3. See also * Centre national de la re ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Astronomical Catalogue
An astronomical catalog or catalogue is a list or tabulation of astronomical objects, typically grouped together because they share a common type, morphology, origin, means of detection, or method of discovery. The oldest and largest are star catalogues. Hundreds have been published, including general ones and special ones for such items as infrared stars, variable stars, giant stars, multiple star systems, star clusters, and so forth. General catalogs for deep space objects or for objects other than stars are also large. Again, there are specialized ones for nebulas, galaxies, X-ray sources, radio sources, quasars and other classes. The same is true for asteroids, comets and other Small Solar System body, solar system bodies. Astronomical catalogs such as those for asteroids may be compiled from multiple sources, but most modern catalogs are the result of a particular astronomical survey of some kind. Since the late 20th century catalogs are increasingly often compiled by com ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
VizieR
A vizier (; ar, وزير, wazīr; fa, وزیر, vazīr), or wazir, is a high-ranking political advisor or minister in the near east. The Abbasid caliphs gave the title ''wazir'' to a minister formerly called ''katib'' (secretary), who was at first merely a helper but afterwards became the representative and successor of the ''dapir'' (official scribe or secretary) of the Sassanian kings. In modern usage, the term has been used for government ministers in much of the Middle East and beyond. Several alternative spellings are used in English, such as ''vizir'', ''wazir'', and ''vezir''. Etymology Vizier is suggested to be an Iranian word, from the Pahlavi root of ''vičir'', which originally had the meaning of a ''decree'', ''mandate'', and ''command'', but later as its use in Dinkard also suggests, came to mean ''judge'' or ''magistrate''. Arthur Jeffery considers the word to be a "good Iranian" word, as has a well-established root in Avestan language. The Pahlavi ''viči ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |