Johann Gottfried Galle

Vocation

German astronomer and discoverer of the planet Neptune. He studied at Berlin university from 1830 to 1833, worked as an assistant at the Berlin Observatory for 16 years starting 1835. He discovered a dark inner ring of Saturn in 1838 and three new comets in 1839. It took him until 1846 to complete his doctorate. On 23 September 1846 he received a letter from the French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier, who told him about perturbations in the orbit of Uranus and asked him to search a specific part of the sky. During the following night he discovered with the assistance of student Heinrich Louis d'Arrest an object of 8th magnitude. The next night they could measure the proper movement of this object as 4 arc seconds, proving it to be a planet. In 1851 he moved to Breslau (today Wrocław) to become professor of astronomy and the director of the local observatory. Throughout his career he studied comets, and in 1894 (with the help of his son Andreas Galle) he published a list with 414 comets. He himself had previously discovered three comets in the short span from 2 December 1839 to 6 March 1840. He died in Potsdam at age 98. Link to Wikipedia biography