Ercole Dembowski was an Italian astronomer and mathematician who made significant contribution to the study of double stars.
Background
Ethnicity:
Dembowski's father was a Pole, and his mother was an Italian.
Ercole Dembowski was born on January 12, 1812 in Milan, Italy. He was the son of Jan Dembowski, a general of Napoleon, and Matilde Viscontini, an Italian noblewoman. He also had a brother named Carlo.
Dembowski inherited the title of Baron as the son one of Napoleon's Polish generals.
Education
In 1819 Dembowski and his brother went to a boarding school in Volterra.
Orphaned, in 1825 Dembowski entered the Austrian school in Venice.
Career
Until he was thirty-one Dembowski was an officer in the Austrian navy; he made several expeditions to the Orient and participated in some minor battles in which he distinguished himself by gallantry.
Having left the navy Dembowski became interested in astronomy. In 1852 he built his own observatory in the village of San Giorgio a Cremano, near Naples, where he made excellent observations of double stars with only a modest telescope of five-inch aperture.
In 1870 he returned to Lombardy and constructed at Monte di Albizzate, near Gallarate, a new observatory equipped with a telescope of seven-inch aperture by Merz and a meridian circle by Starke. With these new instruments he continued the revision of Struve’s Dorpat Catalogue that he had begun in Naples.
Dembowski’s first publication (1857) contains measurements of 127 double and triple stars selected from Struve’s Dorpat Catalogue; each measurement represents the mean of ten observations made on the same night. In 1859 he published a reexamination of all the brightest stars in the Dorpat Catalogue, and in 1860 he listed - with great accuracy - the positions of fifty-four double stars. These measurements were used by Argelander in his fundamental work on proper motion of 250 stars.
Following Dembowski’s death Otto Struve credited him with having made about 20,000 observations. At the same time, G. V. Schiaparelli urged the Reale Accademia dei Lincei to undertake the collation and publication of Dembowski’s scattered observations. The work, edited by Schiaparelli and Struve, appeared two years later.
Dembowski was elected an associate member of the Royal Astronomical Society (London) on November 8, 1878.
Personality
Dembowski was a very active observer, and regularly published (mainly in Astronomische Nachrichten) the results of his observations for the benefit of the other astronomers working in the same field.
Connections
In 1844 Dembowski moved to Naples where he married the Baroness Enrichetta Bellelli. They had three children.