Abstract
WITH deep regret we have to announce the death, on July 10, at ninety-eight years of age, of the veteran astronomer Prof. J. G. Galle, the doyen of the Associates of the Royal Astronomical Society, into which body he was elected in 1848. For many years he had been connected with the Berlin Observatory, and will be remembered as the last of the little band of astronomers who were associated in the discovery of Neptune. Galle it was who had the good fortune to carry to complete fruition the successful analyses of Adams and of Le Verrier. It was his lucky chance to compare Bremiker's map with the sky, to detect the planet, and establish its identity by determining the motion. He long outlived all his companions and associates in that historic scene enacted in the Berlin Observatory on September 23, 1846, the antecedents of which have been told so many times that it is unnecessary to refer to them here more particularly. It is more pertinent to recall, as more likely to have been forgotten, that he was one of the first to have seen the “crape” ring of Saturn. When this discovery was announced in 1850, simultaneously by Bond and Dawes, Galle directed attention to some observations he had made twelve years earlier, in 1838—9, in which he had actually measured the diameter of this interior dusky ring. The observations were communicated at the time to the Berlin Academy, but Galle did not insist on their importance, as he could not persuade himself that the phenomenon was permanent and not due to the effect of contrast.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Prof. J. G. Galle . Nature 84, 45–46 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/084045a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/084045a0