Wiesław Z. Wiśniewski (May 2, 1931 in

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...

– February 28, 1994 in

Tucson Tucson (; ; ) is a city in Pima County, Arizona, United States, and its county seat. It is the second-most populous city in Arizona, behind Phoenix, Arizona, Phoenix, with a population of 542,630 in the 2020 United States census. The Tucson ...

Arizona Arizona is a U.S. state, state in the Southwestern United States, Southwestern region of the United States, sharing the Four Corners region of the western United States with Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. It also borders Nevada to the nort ...

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) was a Polish

astronomer An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. Astronomers observe astronomical objects, such as stars, planets, natural satellite, moons, comets and galaxy, galax ...

. Wisniewski was born and educated in Poland. He survived the Nazi occupation and many of his later insights and viewpoints may have grown from the hardships suffered during the war and the years afterwards. He began his career as a high school mathematics teacher before receiving his M.A. degree in astronomy from Poznan University in 1952 and his D.Sc. degree in astronomy from

Jagiellonian University The Jagiellonian University (, UJ) is a public research university in Kraków, Poland. Founded in 1364 by Casimir III the Great, King Casimir III the Great, it is the oldest university in Poland and one of the List of oldest universities in con ...

, Poland, in 1962. He joined the staff of the Cracow Observatory at Jagiellonian University as a research assistant in 1953. From 1957 to 1959, he participated as a Scientist of the

International Geophysical Year The International Geophysical Year (IGY; ), also referred to as the third International Polar Year, was an international scientific project that lasted from 1 July 1957 to 31 December 1958. It marked the end of a long period during the Cold War w ...

Expedition to

Spitsbergen Spitsbergen (; formerly known as West Spitsbergen; Norwegian language, Norwegian: ''Vest Spitsbergen'' or ''Vestspitsbergen'' , also sometimes spelled Spitzbergen) is the largest and the only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipel ...

. Wisniewski moved to the United States in 1963 to work as an astronomy professor at the newly founded

Lunar and Planetary Laboratory The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) is a research center for planetary science located in Tucson, Arizona. It is also a graduate school, constituting the Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona. LPL is one of the wor ...

at the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona, United States. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it ...

. Wisniewski returned to Poland in 1967, but eventually made his permanent home in Tucson, Arizona in 1971. His main interests were

comet A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that warms and begins to release gases when passing close to the Sun, a process called outgassing. This produces an extended, gravitationally unbound atmosphere or Coma (cometary), coma surrounding ...

s and

asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the Solar System#Inner Solar System, inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter (Trojan asteroids). As ...

s. Wisniewski was heavily involved in astronomical photometry which he learned while working with Harold Johnson at the

. His later years were occupied with observations of asteroids and comets, especially of the light-curves of small asteroids as well as taxonomic measurements of asteroids. At the time of his death, he was actively planning to participate in a network of telescopes to observe the impacts of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter. He had obtained one of the early high resolution images of the comet on March 28, 1993 while using the Steward Observatory 90 inch telescope.

References

External links

Dictionary Of Minor Planet Names (Google Books)Wiesław Z. Wiśniewski at Tucson CompleteJames V. Scotti, Wieslaw Z. Wisniewski (1931-1994), "Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society", 1994, 26, 1611
1931 births 1994 deaths 20th-century Polish astronomers University of Arizona people Polish emigrants to the United States {{Europe-astronomer-stub

See also

References

External links