Research Paper-Johann Heinrich von Madler

Johann Madler was a German astronomer in the 19th century. When he was 19, he became an orphan due to an outbreak of typhus and he had to raise three younger sisters. He began teaching and privately tutoring. By doing this profession, he met Wilhelm Beer in 1924. Wilhelm Beer was a wealthy banker.
In 1926, Wilhelm Beer set up a private observatory and hired Johann Madler to work with him. Wilhelm Beer and Johann Madler produced the first true maps of Mars in 1830. They also made a preliminary determination for Mars’ rotational period which was off by almost 13 seconds. The exact figure for one earth day that Johann Madler got was 24 hours, 37 minutes, and 9.9 seconds. The map that he made of Mars showed the small dark feature on Mars but Johan neglected to give it, or any other features on Mars a name. To do this, he chose a small dark region and precisely timed its’ appearance night after night Beer and Madler also made the first exact map of the moon. This map of the moon was called Mappa Selenographica and was published into 4 volumes from 1834 to 1836. In 1837, another map of the moon was published and the two became the most descriptive of the moon for many decades. The two maps were finally surpassed in detail in the 1870s by Johann Schmidt. Beer and Madler also came to the conclusion while studying the moon that its features did not change and it did not have an atmosphere or water.
In 1836, Johann Madler was appointed by Johann Franz Encke as an observer at the Berlin Observatory. The telescope that he used at this observatory was a 240-mm refractor telescope while the one at the private observatory was a 95-mm refractor telescope. In 1840, he was appointed as the director position at an observatory in Estonia, called the Dorpat Observatory. At the observatory, he made both meteorological and astronomical observations. He continued the previous director’s observations of double stars. He remained at the observatory in Estonia until he retired in 1865, and then returned to Germany.
Johann Madler also came up with the “Central Sun Hypothesis” by examining the motions of the stars. According to his hypothesis, the center of the galaxy was located in the Pleiades and that the sun revolved around that point. This hypothesis was later proven to be wrong.
Along with his accomplishments of mapping mars and the moon, Johann Madler made calculations concerning the true time of the earth’s orbit around the sun. His calculations of the tropical year were with precision that had never been obtained prior to his calculations. Based upon his calculations, he proposed a new 128-year rule. This rule stated that every 128 years would also be a common year, as opposed to a leap year. The first year that this started, oddly, was 1900, which was not a multiple of 128. This new rule allowed for only .025 days of error for every 10,000 years.
Johann Madler had many accomplishments and had a few features on other bodies in space named after him. In 1958, Johann Madler had a crater on Mars named after him, by the International Astronomical Union. There was also a crater named after Johan Madler on the moon. He also published many scientific works, along with a two-volume book called History of Descriptive Astronomy in 1873.
Sources:
* Mapping Mars by Oliver Morton
* http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/mars/chap04.htm
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Heinrich_von_M%C3%A4dler