Gould, Benjamin Apthorp

Benjamin Apthorp Gould, (born Sept. 27, 1824, Boston, Mass., U.S.—died Nov. 26, 1896, Cambridge, Mass.), American astronomer whose star catalogs helped fix the list of constellations of the Southern Hemisphere.

A child prodigy who could read aloud at age three and compose poems in Latin at age five, Gould studied mathematics and the physical sciences under Benjamin Peirce at Harvard University. In 1845 he went to Germany to study astronomy and was the first American to earn a doctorate in this field, at the University of Göttingen in 1848. Returning to the United States, Gould was anxious to raise American astronomy to the European level. In 1849 he founded The Astronomical Journal, which was modeled on the German journal Astronomische Nachrichten and was the first journal of professional astronomical research published in the United States. Publication lapsed in 1861 because of financial difficulties and the outbreak of the Civil War. After a 25-year hiatus, Gould restarted The Astronomical Journal in 1886, and it continues to the present-day.

From 1852 until 1867 Gould was in charge of the longitude department of the U.S. Coast Survey. In 1859 he published a treatise on the positions and proper motions of the circumpolar stars that were used as standards by the U.S. Coast Survey. Gould was one of the first to use the telegraph to determine longitudes. This he did by simultaneously finding the Sun’s direction at two sites, one for which the longitude was known, and comparing the findings to compute the unknown longitude. In 1866 he made use of the Atlantic cable to establish the difference of longitude between the observatories at Greenwich, Eng., and Washington, D.C.

Because Gould was temperamental and difficult to work with and made many personal enemies, he had an unhappy career in the United States and was unable to secure a permanent position as an astronomer. But he was invited by the government of Argentina to found and direct the National Observatory at Córdoba in 1868. Two years later he began his observations and in 1874 completed his Uranometria Argentina (1879; “An Argentine Uranometry”). In 1884 he published a zone catalog, covering 73,160 stars in a particular portion of the sky, and one year later a general catalog of 32,448 stars in the Southern Hemisphere. He returned to Massachusetts in 1885.