Asaph Hall

Asaph Hall
Birthday	Thursday, October 15, 1829
Birthplace	Goshen, Connecticut
Died	Friday, November 22, 1907
Nationality	American
Known for	Discovery of 2 Martian moons

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Hall, Asaph

 

Born Oct. 15, 1829, in Goshen, Conn.; died Nov. 22, 1907, in Annapolis, Md. American astronomer. Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1875).

From 1857 to 1862, Hall worked as an assistant at the Harvard University Observatory, and from 1862 to 1891 he was an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. He was a member of the faculty at Harvard University from 1896 to 1901. Hall is known for his observations of asteroids, binary stars, and the planets and their satellites. In 1876 he determined Saturn’s period of rotation, and in 1877 he discovered the satellites of Mars. Hall worked to develop a theory of the motions of the planets and their satellites.

WORKS

“On the Determination of the Mass of Mars.” Astronomische Nachrichten, 1875, vol. 86, pp. 327–37.
“On the Rotation of Saturn.” Ibid., 1877, vol. 90.
“The Harvard Observation of the Satellite of Neptune in 1847 and 1848.” Astronomical Journal, 1900, vol. 20.
“The Problem of Three Bodies.” Ibid., 1901, vol. 21.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.