Eduard Heis

Eduard Heis was a German mathematician and astronomer, born in Cologne on 18 February 1806 and died in Münster on 30 June 1877. He completed his education at the University of Bonn in 1827 and then taught mathematics at a school in Cologne, moving to Aachen in 1832 where he stayed until 1852. In that year King Frederick William IV appointed him to a chair at the Academy of Münster, and he became its rector in 1869. At Münster he made long series of naked-eye observations of the night sky, covering the Milky Way, the zodiacal light, stars and shooting stars, and he was the first person to record a count of the Perseid meteor shower, in 1839, giving an hourly rate of 160. His star atlas, the Atlas Coelestis Novus of 1872, was based on Argelander's Uranometria Nova and influenced the selection of northern constellations later adopted by the International Astronomical Union. He also wrote mathematics textbooks and a treatise on the eclipses of the Peloponnesian War, and a crater on the Moon is named after him.