When And Where Did Johann Bode Live?

Johann Elert Bode was an astronomer who lived 1747-1826. He was born in Hamburg (Germany) and lived most of his adult life in Berlin.

During his life he identified and described ("discovered") a lot of interesting things in the sky, including comets, star clusters, nebulae and galaxies. He also claimed to discover at least 20 objects in the sky which were mistakes; nobody else can find them and maybe he just had a smear of something on the telescope lens which made him think he saw something.

Bode was good at both finding comets and calculating their orbits well enough to figure out when they would return. He wrote many textbooks about his work and guidebooks to finding objects in the night-time sky.

It is hard to believe that anybody could see much of anything from the Berlin night-time sky nowadays, as heavily light-polluted it and most other cities now are.

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