Johann Elert Bode

Born Jan. 19, 1747, in Hamburg; died Nov. 23, 1826, in Berlin. German astronomer.

Bode was director of the Berlin Observatory (after 1786) and founder of The Berlin Astronomical Yearbook (1774). His 20-sheet Atlas of the Sky (1778) contains 17,240 stars, of which only 12,000 had previously been noted on maps. He was one of the authors (1772) of the empirical laws (the Titius-Bode’s law), which established the dependence between planets’ distances from the sun.