Background
He was born on September 19, 1813 at Coldenbüttel, Schleswig, Germany, the son of Hartwig Peters, a minister.
He was born on September 19, 1813 at Coldenbüttel, Schleswig, Germany, the son of Hartwig Peters, a minister.
Having studied at the Gymnasium in Flensburg from 1825 to 1832, he matriculated at the University of Berlin, where he studied mathematics and astronomy under Encke. After receiving his doctor's degree in 1836, he went to Göttingen to study under Gauss.
From 1838 to 1843 he was engaged in a survey of Mount Etna, as a member of the scientific expedition organized by Sartorius von Waltershausen. He declined an offer of the directorship of the Catania Observatory on account of certain imposed conditions.
Later he accepted the very important governmental post of director of the trigonometrical survey of Sicily. He was deprived of this position and ordered to leave the country when, in 1848, he sided with the Sicilian revolutionists; but he soon returned to Sicily, where he became naturalized and served as captain of engineers and later as major under Mieroslawski. Catania and Messina were fortified under his direction.
After the fall of Palermo in 1849 he fled to France and soon after went to Constantinople. The Sultan planned to send him on a scientific expedition to Syria and Palestine but difficulties arose and eventually, with the beginning of the Crimean War, the plan was abandoned. During his stay here Peters acquired a good working knowledge of Arabic and Turkish, which was of great use to him in his later studies on Ptolemy's Almagest.
He came to the United States in 1854 with letters of recommendation from Alexander von Humboldt and obtained a position in the United States Coast Survey. He was stationed for a time at Cambridge, Massachussets, and at the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York. In 1858 he was appointed director of the observatory at Hamilton College and in 1867, Litchfield Professor of Astronomy and director of the Litchfield Observatory. His scientific interests were wide.
His researches on the sun, begun in Naples in 1845, and carried on until about 1865, blazed the way for further studies. Some of his conclusions were published in "Contributions to the Atmospherology of the Sun, " in Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1856). He described how sun spots were apparently divided by bridges of luminous gas, and investigated as far as his observational material permitted the motion of sun spots on the solar disk.
The task which he set himself in 1860, to prepare charts of the Zodiac, to give the positions of all stars in this belt visible in his 13-inch telescope, involved over 100, 000 observations. Begun at a time when photography had not yet come into its own, these charts were to be a record of the sky at that time which could be compared, for the detection of changes, with similar charts made by future astronomers. The immediate result, however, was the discovery of forty-eight new asteroids - at that time a relatively large addition to the list of these bodies. He is said to have found recreation in computing their orbits. He also discovered two comets, one in 1846 while he was at Naples and one in 1857 when he was at Albany.
In 1874 he was sent as chief of the United States expedition to New Zealand to observe the transit of Venus. Observations were seriously hampered by clouds but that of the first internal contact with the sun's disk was successful. This transit was observed by many parties in different places, in the attempt to determine a more accurate value of the sun's distance. In 1869 he organized an expedition to observe the solar eclipse at Des Moines.
About 1876 he started his attempt to prepare a more trustworthy edition of the star catalogue in the seventh and eighth books of Ptolemy's Almagest. This is the oldest catalogue containing positions of sufficient accuracy to be useful in comparison with modern catalogues for the detection of changes. Peters' task, therefore, was to collate as many of the copies as possible, Greek, Arabic, and Latin, decide what errors had been introduced, identify the stars. The examination of manuscripts took him to Vienna, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Paris. He was fortunate in having the collaboration of Edward B. Knobel who, equally interested in the problem, collated the British manuscripts, and, after Peters' death, edited the notes and catalogue.
Christian Henry Frederick Peters was a pioneer in the study of asteroids. He discovered 48 asteroids, beginning with 72 Feronia in 1861 and ending with 287 Nephthys in 1889. He co-discovered the periodic comet 80P/Peters–Hartley, and also discovered various nebulae and galaxies. Among his famous records may be mentioned "Corrigenda in Various Star Catalogues", "Contributions to the Atmospherology of the Sun" and others. On his visit to Paris in 1887 to attend the convention to inaugurate the international photographic survey of the sky, the decoration of the Legion of Honor was conferred on him by the French government. The main-belt asteroid 100007 Peters was named in his memory.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a foreign associate of the Royal Astronomical Society.
He was a man of the highest integrity and honor, courteous and kind and rich in friends. He was fluent in most of the European languages and had ample knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.
He had, also, high mathematical ability both in theory and computation. His industry and quick perception enabled him to give the problem the scrupulous study which it required.
There is no information about his marital status.
