maximilian+wolf

=INTRODUCTION=

Born Maximilian Franz Jospeh Cornelius Wolf in 1863 in Heildelsburg the son of a popular medical doctor, Dr. Franz Wolf. His father encouraged an interest is science and built an observatory for his son in the garden of the home. It is from here that Wolf is credited with his first astronomical discovery He was very young when he started to wonder about the stars and the galaxy. That is what made Wolf such a great astronomer that developed new material and discovered and applied photography to celestial objects and invented the earliest method of discovering asteroids with the photographic telescope and many other things. Wolf was born in and educated in the same place he was born, at the universities of Heidelberg in Germany and Stockholm in Sweden. Wolf also confirmed the existence of dark clouds of interstellar matter called dark nebulae.

=CONTRIBUTIONS=

Wolf was the first astronomer to use time lapse photography in astronomy, a method he used for detecting astroids. At the time Wolf was the only German Astronomer that developed new photographic methods for observational astronomy. He discovered several nebulae,including a cluster of 108 faint nebulae in the constellation of Coma Berenices and another group in Virgo, and observed variable stars and a temporary star that appeared in Aquila1927. both inside and outside the Milky Way. More than 200 astroids and in 1883 a comet which now bears his name. In 1903 he discovered the first of the so-called Trojan satellites (number 588, later named Achilles), whose orbits are in precise line up with that of Jupiter. They form a gravitationally stable configuration between Jupiter and the Sun. This kind of triangular three-bodied system had been analysed and predicted theoretically by Joseph Lagrange in the 1770s.Wolf discovered that the dark voids in the universe is in fact are nebulae blocked by big clouds of dust. He studied the spectral characteristics and distribution. Wolf also was the first to view Haley's comet when it approached the Earth in 1909.

=LATER YEARS=

In 1893 Wolf became director of the new Königstuhl Observatory and was appointed to an extraordinary professorship in astrophysics at Heildelsburg nine years later he was elected to the chair of astronomy at Heidelberg. Through his photographic studies he established the presence of dark clouds of interstelluar activity in the Milky Way Galaxy, and he was the first to use the stereocomparator (a type of stereoscopic viewer), which greatly helps in the discovery of and identification of variable or moving objects or matter in celestial photographs. Wolf spent the last of years in Heidelburg were many more accomplishments was made. Wolf started a pre- junior astronomy class which gave young students a chance to get an early head start if they wanted to study in the field of astronomy. He also contributed numerous papers in many areas of astronomy up to the end of his life. We inspired many people and died fairly young for an astronomer, He was 69 years old when he died in Heidelburg on October 3, 1932. He wa survived by his widow and two kids.