- German astronomer
and mathematician who contributed greatly to the popularization of
astronomy. He published the first atlas of all stars visible to the
naked eye, Uranographia 1801, and devised Bode's law.
Bode, born in Hamburg, taught himself astronomy. He was director of
the Berlin observatory 1786-1825.
Bode worked on the compilation of two atlases, Vorstellung der Gestirne
and Uranographia, which described the positions of more than 17,000
stars and included for the first time some of the celestial bodies
discovered by William Herschel. It was Bode who named Herschel's new
planet Uranus.
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