Franz Brünnow

Franz Friedrich Ernst Brünnow (November 18, 1821 – August 20, 1891) was a German astronomer.

He was born in Berlin, and attended the Friedrich-Wilhelm gymnasium. In 1839 he entered the University of Berlin, where he studied mathematics, astronomy and physics, as well as chemistry, philosophy and philology. After graduating as Ph.D. in 1842 he took an active part in astronomical work at the Berlin Observatory, under the direction of Johann Franz Encke, contributing numerous important papers on the orbits of comets and minor planets to the Astronomische Nachrichten.

He was the first foreigner to become director of an American observatory, serving as director of Detroit Observatory from 1854 to 1863. He played a major role in establishing the study of astronomy in the United States at a time when the only other serious faculty was run by Benjamin Peirce at Harvard University. He introduced the teaching of rigorous German analytical methods and trained a number of students who went on to further American astronomy, including Asaph Hall and James Craig Watson (the latter succeeded him as director of Detroit Observatory). In addition, Charles Augustus Young learned German astronomical methods from Brünnow although he did not attend the University of Michigan.

He was born in Berlin to Johann and Wilhelmine (née Weppler). In 1847 he was appointed director of the Bilk Observatory, near Düsseldorf, and in the following year published the well-known Mémoire sur la comète elliptique de De Vico, for which he received the gold medal of the Amsterdam Academy. In 1851 he succeeded Johann Gottfried Galle as first assistant at the Berlin Observatory. Also in 1851 he wrote the textbook Lehrbuch der Sphärischen Astronomie, which he translated to English himself in 1865 as Handbook of Spherical Astronomy.

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