Johann Encke, German Astronomer
Johann Franz Encke (September 23, 1791 - August 26, 1865) was a German astronomer. He studied mathematics and astronomy from 1811 at the University of Gottingen under Carl Friedrich Gauss. He became famous as the discoverer of the short periodic comets. The first object of this family, the Encke comet, was named after him and so it is one of the few comets not named after the discoverer, but after the one who calculated the orbit. Eight treatises on the comet's movements were published by him in the Berliner Abhandlungen (1829-1859). From a fresh discussion of the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 he deduced a solar parallax of arcsecond. This and the corresponding distance to the sun were long accepted as authoritative. In 1837, he described a broad variation in the brightness of the A Ring of Saturn. The Encke Gap was later named in honor of his observations of Saturn's rings. In 1844, Encke became professor for astronomy at the University of Berlin. Much labor was bestowed by him upon facilitating the computation of the movements of the asteroids. Incipient brain-disease compelled him to withdraw from official life in November 1863. He died in 1865 at the age of 73.
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