Background
Heinrich Louis d’Arrest was born on August 13, 1822 Berlin, Germany. His father was an accountant of Huguenot descent.
In 1848 d’Arrest was elected a foreign associate of the Royal Astronomical Society of London.
Original site of the Französisches Gymnasium on Niederlagstraße, Berlin-Mitte. D’Arrest attended the Collège Français in Berlin.
D’Arrest studied at the University of Berlin, astronomy, Bachelor of Science, Master of Science in Berlin, Germany.
D’Arrest received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Leipzig in 1850.
D'Arrest received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1875.
2.3°N 14.7°E
D'Arrest is a lunar impact crater that is located in the lava-flooded region to the west of the Mare Tranquillitatis.
Heinrich Louis d’Arrest was born on August 13, 1822 Berlin, Germany. His father was an accountant of Huguenot descent.
D’Arrest attended the Collège Français in Berlin before entering the University of Berlin in 1839. He was a promising graduate student, with half a dozen publications and a medal from the King of Denmark for discovering the comet 1845 I. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Leipzig in 1850.
While D’Arrest attended the University of Berlin in 1839, at this time Johann Gottfried Galle got permission from Johann Franz Encke, director of the Berlin Observatory, to look for the trans-Uranian planet predicted by Urbain Leverrier. D’Arrest volunteered to help, and suggested the star chart to use: Hora XXI of the Berliner Akademische Sternkarten, completed by Carl Bremiker but not yet published. The search was successful that same night (23 September 1846), owing in large part to the excellence of the chart, but in making the initial announcement Encke mentioned only his staff member Galle and himself; it was not until 1877 that Galle set the record straight.
In 1848 d’Arrest was elected a foreign associate of the Royal Astronomical Society of London and chosen to fill a new post at the Leipzig observatory, where he worked under August Ferdinand Möbius.
After receiving his Ph.D. degree from the University of Leipzig in 1850, he published his first book in 1851, Ueber das System der kleinerer Planeten zwischen Mars und Jupiter, a study of the thirteen asteroids then known. His interest in comets and asteroids continued, as shown by his discovery of two more comets (1851 II, mentioned above, and 1857 I) and of the asteroid (76) Freia in 1862, but now d’Arrest began the studies of nebulae for which he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1875.
Although many nebulae had already been observed, notably by William Herschel and his son John, their nature and particularly their distances were still unknown. To improve the situation d’Arrest made, and published in 1857, accurate measurements of the positions and appearances of two hundred and sixty-nine selected nebulous objects; after he became, in 1858, professor in the University of Copenhagen and director of its new observatory, he extended these observations to 1,942 nebulae, published as Siderum nebulosorum observationes Hafniensis 1861–1867, but gave up this approach when he realized that even those nebulae bright enough to be detected by his eleven-inch telescope were too numerous for any one man to observe in a lifetime.
Just before his untimely death d’Arrest began spectroscopic observations, following the lead of Sir William Huggins, and was the first to point out, in 1873, that the gaseous nebulae (those with bright line spectra) were preferentially located near the plane of the Milky Way and therefore probably relatively nearby objects in our own galaxy.
He died on June 14, 1875 at the aged of 52 in Copenhagen.
In 1848 d’Arrest was elected a foreign associate of the Royal Astronomical Society of London.
Heinrich Louis d’Arrest was married in 1857 to Auguste Emilie Möbius, who was a daughter of his supervisor August Ferdinand Möbius.