Friedrich Agland

On February 17, 1875, Prussian astronomer Friedrich Agland passed away at the age of 76.

character brief introduction

Agland was born in 1799 in Memel, Prussia (now Leipida, Lithuania) to a German father and a Finnish mother. Agland studied under the famous German astronomer Bethel and received his doctorate in physics in Königsberg in 1822. From 1823 to 1837, Agland served as the leader of several Finnish observatories before moving to Bonn, where he established a good personal friendship with King Frederick Wilhelm IV of Prussia and became director of the Bonn Observatory, where he carried out astrometry. Thanks to his and his colleagues' efforts, between 1852 and 1859, the Bonn Observatory published the Bonn Catalog, which recorded the positions of 324,189 stars, the most complete catalog before the invention of photography. Agland was one of the early astronomers to study variable stars. In 1863 he founded the German Astronomical Society. He died in Bonn in 1875. Asteroid 1551 and a crater on the moon were named in his honor. In 2006, the Agland Institute for Astronomy was established at the University of Bonn.