The Collected Works of Olbers

Abstract

GERMANY has not produced as many amateur astronomers as England has, but among them the man whose complete writings have now been published occupies a most remarkable place. Olbers was an amateur, but his work was that of a professional astronomer. Though occupied all day in the extensive practice of a physician, he devoted his nights to searching for comets, making micrometric observations of these bodies, whether found by himself or others, with the annular micrometer, an instrument the immense value of which he was the first to perceive, and computing their orbits by the simple method devised by him, which he is said first to have applied practically while watching at the bedside of a patient. At the top of his house in the Sandstrasse in Bremen he had his exceedingly modest observatory, at the equipment of which, consisting only of small and portable instruments, any modern amateur would turn up his nose. For years he was obliged to correct his clock by tedious observations of equal altitudes with a sextant and artificial horizon, until he devised the simpler and quicker method of watching the disappearance of stars behind a distant tower. But his labours brought him a plentiful reward, not only in the discovery of the planets Pallas and Vesta and various comets, and in the renown which these and his important publications procured him, but also in the friendship of Schröter, Zach, Gauss, Bessel, Schumacher, Encke and others, who always in their letters and published writings mention him with the greatest veneration.

Wilhelm Olbers, sein Leben und seine Werke.

Im Auftrage der Nachkommen herausgegeben von Dr. C. Schilling. Erster Band, Gesammelte Werke. xix. + 707 pp. 8vo., with portrait. (Berlin, 1894.)