Research on asteroids of Christian Ludwig Gerling and his students in the nineteenth century

Abstract

One of the mayor topics in astronomy at the beginning of the 19th century was the interpretation of the observations of the first asteroids. In 1810 Christian Ludwig Gerling at the age of twenty two came to Göttingen University to continue his academic studies. Supervised by Carl Friedrich Gauß at the observatory he was engaged in studies of theoretical and practical astronomy. Starting in 1812 Gerling accepted the responsibility for collecting observational data of the asteroid Vesta from the European observatories and for calculating the ephemeris of this new minor planet. In 1817 Gerling was appointed professor at Marburg University. One of his early astronomical projects in Marburg was his contribution to the Berliner Akademische Sternkarten. After completion of his observatory in 1841 Gerling’s students started observing and theoretically analysing the orbits of the continuously newly discovered asteroids including the perturbation of the larger solar system bodies. The observations at Gerling’s observatory are the first astrometric measurements of solar systems minor bodies of Hesse.