Friedrich Wilhelm August Argelander

Friedrich Wilhelm August Argelander was a German astronomer, born in Memel in the Kingdom of Prussia on 22 March 1799 and died on 17 February 1875. He studied with Friedrich Bessel, became his assistant in 1820 and took his doctorate at the University of Königsberg in 1822. From 1823 to 1837 he headed the observatory in Turku and then Helsinki, and he then moved to Bonn, where he designed and built a new observatory for the university. He developed practical methods for measuring stellar positions and magnitudes and measured stellar distances with heliometers. He began the careful study of variable stars and introduced the modern system of naming them, and in 1842 he found the very large proper motion of Groombridge 1830, which was long called Argelander's Star. With Adalbert Krüger and Eduard Schönfeld he produced the Bonner Durchmusterung of 1859 to 1862, which gave the positions and brightness of more than 324,000 stars, and in 1863 he helped found the Astronomische Gesellschaft. He is in this atlas as the mentor of mathematician and astronomer Eduard Heis.