Abstract
ON Feb. 20 there passed away at Arcetri, Florence, aged eighty-two years, after a short illness, Prof. Antonio Abetti, the doyen of Italian astronomers. Born at Gorizia, in Frioul, in 1846, he took his degree in mathematics at the University of Padua in 1867, and at once entered the astronomical observatory of that city, rendered famous, like that of Pisa and Florence, by Galileo Galilei. As assistant to Prof. Santini, then director, he was one of the Italian astronomical party of 1874 for observing the transit of Venus in India. After Santini's death, he collaborated at Padua with Prof. Lorenzoni and went to Florence in 1893 as director of the Arcetri Observatory, the reorganisation of which, begun by Donati, he completed, raising it, as the Institute of Astrophysics, to one of the most important in Italy. He remounted Amici's famous equatorial and did important work in the study of the minor planets or asteroids, on which he published numerous papers.
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PRELLER, C. Prof. Antonio Abetti. Nature 121, 594 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/121594a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/121594a0