Born Hanover, Germany, 30 November 1883
Died Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 20 July 1945
German variable‐star astronomer Richard Prager compiled a three‐volume catalog of variable stars and their literature, which was the primary source of information on these between 1925 and 1949. He was educated at Hamburg (1901) and Göttingen (1903) universities, receiving a Ph.D. from Berlin in 1908 and holding a position as an assistant at the Berlin Academy of Sciences for the next year. In 1909, Prager accepted a position as a section chief at the Observatorio Astronomico Nacional in Santiago de Chile, where he worked with Friedrich Ristenpart during the latter's abortive attempt to rejuvenate the facility. There Prager made a number of measurements of positions of Solar System objects including 139 of comet 1P/Halley during its 1910 appearance.
Returning to Germany in 1913, Prager was first assistant and then observer at the Berlin–Babelsbürg Observatory, being appointed professor in 1916....
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Selected References
Ashbrook, Joseph (1984). “A South American Tragedy.” In The Astronomical Scrapbook, edited by Leif J. Robinson, pp. 99–103, esp. p. 101. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Sky Publishing Corp.
Beer, Arthur (1945). Observatory 66: 186.
Gaposchkin, Sergei (1945). “Richard Prager.” Sky & Telescope 4, no. 11: 2.
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Robinson, L.J. (2007). Prager, Richard. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1120
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