Lewis Boss
(1846-1912) directed the Dudley Observatory from 1876 until
1912. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island and graduated
from Dartmouth College in 1870. He worked as a clerk for the
U.S. Government in Washington, D.C., and as assistant
astronomer for the expedition surveying the U.S.- Canada
Boundary . In1876 he was appointed director of the Dudley
Observatory. In his early years there he carried out a portion
of a major international project for mapping the stars of the
northern hemisphere, compiled information on comet orbits, and
led an 1882 expedition to Santiago, Chile, to observe the
transit of Venus. In 1887 he began a program of cataloguing the
positions and proper motions of stars. About 1884 Boss won the
Warner Prize for an essay
about the nature of comets.
By the early twentieth century, he was able, with limited
resources to carry this program to a sufficiently advanced
state to earn the support of the recently founded Carnegie
Institution of Washington, which designated the Dudley
Observatory as its Department of Meridian Astrometry in
1906.
With an enlarged staff, he directed the observation of stars
both from Albany and from a southern observatory in San
Luis, Argentina, and published in 1910 the
Preliminary General Catalogue of 6188 Stars for the Epoch
1900, which for decades remained the most comprehensive
source of accurate proper motions of a large sample of stars.
He also used this data to make his most significant
astronomical discovery, the convergent point of the Hyades star
cluster, which made possible a major step in determining the
distances of the stars.
He died in 1912, leaving his work toward an even larger
Catalogue well launched.
His son Benjamin
Boss directed the completion of this task, leading to the
publication in 1937 of the General Catalogue of 33,342
Stars for the Epoch 1950.
Essay -
"Comets, their Composition, Purpose and Effect upon the Earth"
