Bode, Johann Elert

Bode, Johann Elert (yō`hän ā`lĕrt bō`də), 1747–1826, German astronomer. From 1772 to 1825 he was astronomer of the Academy of Science, Berlin, and from 1786, director of the Berlin Observatory. He is celebrated as the founder (1774) of the Berliner Astronomisches Jahrbuch, but his most noted contribution to astronomy is the Uranographia (1801), a collection of star maps and a catalog of 17,240 stars and nebulae, 12,000 more than had appeared in earlier charts. In 1772 he devised a formula to express the relative distances of the solar system planets from the sun. The same device had been thought out earlier by J. D. Titius of Wittenberg and is therefore sometimes referred to as Titius's law or the Titius-Bode Law, but it is best known as Bode's law.