Carl Ernst Albrecht Hartwig (14 January 1851 in

Frankfurt Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , " Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on it ...

– 3 May 1923 in Bamberg) was a German

astronomer An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses their studies on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. They observe astronomical objects such as stars, planets, moons, comets and galaxies – in either ...

. On 20 August 1885, Hartwig discovered a new star, SN 1885A (S Andromedae), in the

Andromeda Galaxy The Andromeda Galaxy (IPA: ), also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224 and originally the Andromeda Nebula, is a barred spiral galaxy with the diameter of about approximately from Earth and the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way. The gal ...

, which was the first supernova that was ever seen that was outside the Milky Way. He is also credited for the discovery and co-discovery of three parabolic and hyperbolic comets, namely C/1879 Q2, C/1880 S1 and C/1886 T1. In 1882, Hartwig observed the

transit of Venus frameless, upright=0.5 A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and a superior planet, becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. During a tr ...

in Argentina. During the 1883 observation campaign of comet 6P/d'Arrest he found five NGC objects working at the Strasbourg Observatory. In 1874 he became assistant at the

Observatory of Strasbourg 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 187 ...

, 1884 astronomer at

Dorpat Observatory The Tartu Observatory ( et, Tartu Observatoorium) is the largest astronomical observatory in Estonia. On 1 January 2018, Tartu Observatory was joined again to the University of Tartu, and the observatory is now an institute of the university. I ...

and 1887 director of the Remeis Observatory at Bamberg. The French Academy of Sciences awarded him the Prix Valz in 1902 for his

heliometer A heliometer (from Greek ἥλιος ''hḗlios'' "sun" and ''measure'') is an instrument originally designed for measuring the variation of the sun's diameter at different seasons of the year, but applied now to the modern form of the instrument ...

observations and work on

variable stars A variable star is a star whose brightness as seen from Earth (its apparent magnitude) changes with time. This variation may be caused by a change in emitted light or by something partly blocking the light, so variable stars are classified as e ...

. Lunar crater ''Hartwig'' and Martian crater ''Hartwig'' were both named in his honor.

References

External links

Short biography

Additional data on page 21

E. Hartwig
@

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Obituary

AN 219 (1923) 185/186
1851 births 1923 deaths 19th-century German astronomers Discoverers of comets Discoverers of supernovae 20th-century German astronomers {{Germany-astronomer-stub