Leo Anton Karl de Ball

Leo Anton Karl de Ball (November 23 1853–December 12 1916) was a German-Austrian astronomer. He is credited by the Minor Planet Center as "K. de Ball" for his (sole) asteroid discovery, but seems to be best known as Leo de Ball.

He was born at Lobberich in the Rhineland, in Germany. He studied in Bonn and Berlin, receiving his doctorate in 1877. He worked at observatories in Gotha and at Bothkamp, discovering the asteroid 230 Athamantis at the latter in 1882. He then worked at Ougrée Observatory in Ougrée, Belgium, where he analyzed the mass of Saturn and worked on celestial mechanics and measurements of parallax and of double stars.

From 1891 until his death in 1916 he was director of Moriz von Kuffner's observatory in Vienna. Among other things, he measured the parallax of a number of stars and compiled data for a star catalog.

External links

* cite journal
author = Habison, P.
title = Leo de Ball and his contributions to international astronomical projects around 1900 ("Leo de Ball und seine Beiträge zu internationalen Astronomieprojekten um 1900")
journal = Acta Historica Astronomiae
year = 2002
volume = 14
pages = 169–181
url = http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?2002AcHA...14..169H
* http://kuffner-sternwarte.at/sternwarte/vks_ksw_ldball.html
* http://hw.oeaw.ac.at/oebl/oebl_D/DeBall_Leo-Anton-Karl_1853_1916.xml