Background
Carl Ludwig Christian Rümker was born in Mecklenburg, Germany on May 28, 1788. He was the son of J. F. Rümker, a court-councillor.
Carl Ludwig Christian Rümker was born in Mecklenburg, Germany on May 28, 1788. He was the son of J. F. Rümker, a court-councillor.
He showed an aptitude for mathematics and studied at the Builders' Academy, Berlin, graduating in 1807 as a master builder.
He served in the British navy from 1807 until 1817, and was director of the school of navigation at Hamburg from 1819 till 1820. In 1821 he went to New South Wales as astronomer at the observatory built at Parramatta by Sir Thomas Brisbane. He returned to Europe in 1830 and took charge of the observatory at Hamburg. His chief work was concerned with the cataloguing of stars: a preliminary catalogue of the stars of the S. hemisphere was published in 1832 at Hamburg, and in 1846-52 he published his great catalogue of 12, 000 stars. In 1857 he went to reside at Lisbon, where he died on the 21th of December 1862.
He was a member Royal Society.
His son, George Friedrich Wilhelm (1832 - 1900), born on December 31, 1832, at Hamburg, was astronomer at the observatory at Durham, England, from 1853 to 1856. He then became assistant at the Hamburg observatory, and in 1862 was appointed director of the same institution. From 1884 he was the Hamburg delegate for the International Earth Measurement.
