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Born Berlin, (Germany), 4 January 1797
Died Berlin, (Germany), 27 March 1850
Wilhelm Beer, a banker and amateur astronomer, is noted mainly for his contributions to the mapping of Mars and the Moon. Beer was the head of a family banking firm in Berlin, and half‐brother of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Alexander von Humboldt introduced Wilhelm Beer to the astronomer Johann von Mädler , who became his friend and mentor. Beer established a small observatory with a 12‐ft. dome at his villa in the Tiergarten of Berlin, where he installed a 3.75‐in. Fraunhofer refracting telescope that he had purchased from another amateur astronomer, Johann W. Pastorff. With the telescope, Beer and Mädler made an excellent series of observations of Mars at its opposition of 1830 that led to the first map of its surface, and laid the foundation for modern study of the planet.
The names of Beer and Mädler...
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Selected References
Beer, Wilhelm and Johann Heinrich von Mädler (1830). Physikalische Beobachtungen des Mars in der Erdnähe.
——— (1837). Der Mond nach seinen kosmischen und individuellen Verhältnissen, oder, Allgemeine vergleichende Selenographie. Simon Schropp & Comp. Berlin.
——— (1841). Beiträge zur physischen Kenntniss der himmlischen Körper im Sonnensysteme. Weimar.
Kopal, Zdeněk (1970). “Beer, Wilhelm.” In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie. Vol. 1, pp. 568–569. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
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Baum, R. (2007). Beer, Wilhelm. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_131
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