Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was a German astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and geodesist.
16 Facts About Friedrich Bessel
2.
Friedrich Bessel was the first astronomer who determined reliable values for the distance from the sun to another star by the method of parallax.
3.
Friedrich Bessel was born in Minden, Westphalia, then capital of the Prussian administrative region Minden-Ravensberg, as second son of a civil servant into a large family.
4.
Friedrich Bessel came to the attention of Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, a practising physician of Bremen and well-known astronomer, by producing a refinement on the orbital calculations for Halley's Comet in 1804, using old observation data taken from Thomas Harriot and Nathaniel Torporley in 1607.
5.
In 1842 Friedrich Bessel took part in the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Manchester, accompanied by the geophysicist Georg Adolf Erman and the mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, where he gave a report of astronomical clocks.
6.
Friedrich Bessel married Johanna Hagen, the daughter of the chemist and pharmacist Karl Gottfried Hagen who was the uncle of the physician and biologist Hermann August Hagen and the hydraulic engineer Gotthilf Hagen, the latter Friedrich Bessel's student and assistant from 1816 to 1818.
7.
Neumann introduced Friedrich Bessel's exacting methods of measurement and data reduction into his mathematico-physical seminar, which he co-directed with Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi at Konigsberg.
8.
Friedrich Bessel's third daughter Johanna married the politician Adolf Hermann Hagen; their son was the physicist Ernst Bessel Hagen and the mathematician Erich Bessel-Hagen was a grandson of them.
9.
Friedrich Bessel was godfather of Adolf von Baeyer, son of his collaborator Johann Jacob Baeyer.
10.
In 1838 Friedrich Bessel announced that 61 Cygni had a parallax of 0.314 arcseconds; which, given the diameter of the Earth's orbit, indicated that the star is 10.3 ly away.
11.
Friedrich Bessel was the first scientist who realized the effect later called personal equation, that several simultaneously observing persons determine slightly different values, especially recording the transition time of stars.
12.
Friedrich Bessel's method simplified the calculation to such an extent, without sacrificing accuracy, that it is still in use today.
13.
Friedrich Bessel is responsible for the correction to the formula for the sample variance estimator named in his honour.
14.
Friedrich Bessel obtained an estimate of increased accuracy for the Earth's ellipsoid, nowadays called the Bessel ellipsoid, based on several arc measurements.
15.
Friedrich Bessel was one of the first members of the Order Pour le Merite when it was established in 1842.
16.
The first cosmic object named after Friedrich Bessel is the largest crater in the Moon's Mare Serenitatis.