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The development of the Observatory under Weisse, Karlinski and Rudzki (1825-1916) |
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| Next year, Maximilian Weisse, then the assistant to
Littrow in Vienna, won a contest organized in Cracow for
a post of the director of the Astronomical Observatory
and professor of astronomy at the Cracow University.
Weisse contributed significantly to the position and to
the activities of the Cracow Observatory. He began his
work in determining orbits, then he bought in Vienna a
meridian circle and some other astrometric instruments --
also meteorological ones. He also started using the
astronomical instruments that had been bought by Leski.
The astronomical observations program has been modified
and extended. Also systematic meteorological observations
have been organized as well as magnetic ones. Weisse has
elaborated two zonal astrometric catalogues (1846, 1863)
based on Bessel's observations made in Königsberg. These
catalogues were held in a high opinion until the end of
19th century. Weisse overhauled twice the building of the Cracow Observatory: in 1829 and in 1858-1859. He left Cracow in 1861 because of health problems, retired in 1862 and died in 1863 in Upper Austria. His successor as the director of the Cracow Observatory was Franciszek Karlinski, his former assistant; Karlinski returned to Cracow in 1862 from the Prague Observatory and obtained here also the post of an ordinary professor of astronomy and of higher mathematics at the University. In that time there were in the Observatory: 96 instruments, 10 clocks, 941 books and 100 pieces of furniture. The first coworker of Karlinski in Cracow was Jan Kowalczyk, who left Cracow for the Warsaw Observatory very soon, in 1865. The next one was Daniel Wierzbicki, who collaborated with Karlinski, during over 36 years, until his death in 1902. Since 1877 Karlinski maintained in the Observatory a third research post (of an assistant) and its prolongation had to be motivated every two years. In this way several Polish scientists had a good opportunity to make their first steps just there. Karlinski was a member of many scientific societies. Under his management the positional astronomical observations as well as geomagnetic and geodetic ones were continued at the Cracow Observatory. Let us note here, by the way, that Karlinski knowing well standards of astrometric observations had proposed a digital code that was modified later (1892) by A. Krüger and is still used in astrometric data communications by International Astronomical Union. However, the main effort of the Observatory staff was put in performing and elaborating a central point of the networks of meteorological and of hydrological stations acting in the province of Galicia. The obtained results were send, after appropriate reductions have been made, to Vienna, St. Petersburg, Hamburg and Utrecht. In the 1880s a new scientific personage appeared at the Cracow Observatory -- Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer, theoretical physicist, interested also in some computational problems of astronomy (orbits of binary stars and of planetary satellites), and of geophysics (theoretical shape and gravitation of terrestrial spheroid, terrestrial magnetic field and gravimetry). Birkenmajer was giving also lectures on history of mathematics and physics at the Jagiellonian University. In later years he was known as an eminent Copernicanist. F. Karlinski was retired in 1902 and died in 1906. In 1902 Prof. Maurycy Pius Rudzki became a new director of the Observatory and simultaneously the Head of the Chair of astronomy and of Mathematical Geophysics at the Jagiellonian University. Rudzki was a distinguished geophysicist working also in the field of theoretical astrophysics. He was previously an associated professor at the Odessa University after his prior studies in mathematics and in geology at the universities of Lwow (Lemberg) and of Vienna. Rudzki obtained also his degree of M. Sc. in geography at the University of Kharkov. Rudzki planned to build in Cracow a new Observatory out of the town limits and he tried for 5 times to initiate some actions in that direction. However, all these plans failed because of the outbreak of the war in 1914. Rudzki was successful only in developing the geophysical branch of the Observatory. He has established there a seismological station based on two Bosch seismographs with horizontal pendulums. Among two coworkers of Rudzki in Cracow we should note Lucjan Grabowski (who was afterwards professor of geodesy at the Lwow Polytechnical University) and Wladyslaw Dziewulski, a distinguished astronomer, who later on was a professor of the Batory University in Vilna and of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun. Rudzki concentrated mostly on development of geophysical and meteorological research, according to his scientific interest. He proposed e.g. a new method of determining the shape of the Earth from gravimetric measurements as made in terrains with a complicated vertical configuration. He has written also some valuable critical papers on the structure of stars and on the atmospheric circulation of celestial bodies. His textbook "Physics of the Earth" (in Polish) (1909) has been edited in German as "Physik der Erde" two years later in Leipzig. His "Theoretical Astronomy" (1914) is useful till now. The third textbook of Rudzki "Principles of Meteorology" (in Polish) was edited after author's death by his assistant Krassowski in 1917. Rudzki died suddenly of heart attack in July 1916. After his death, in the years 1916-1919, W. Dziewulski has taken de facto the management of the Observatory, although the University authorities charged formally Prof. M. Smoluchowski, a physicist, with those duties, and -- after his death in 1917 -- they turn the Observatory over to Prof. K. Zórawski, a mathematician |