Giacomo F. Maraldi

Giacomo Filippo Maraldi ( born August 21, 1665 in Perinaldo, † December 1, 1729; Jacques Philippe Maraldi and Jacopo Filippo Maraldi ) was a French-Italian astronomer and mathematician. He was the nephew of Giovanni Domenico Cassini and the uncle of Jean -Dominique Maraldi ( Maraldi II).

For most of his life he worked at the Paris Observatory ( 1687-1718 ). Since 1702 he was a member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris.

From 1700 to 1718 he worked on a catalog of fixed stars.

From 1672 to 1719 he studied intensively Mars. He discovered 1704, the North polar cap of Mars. The Südpolarkappe had discovered in 1672 Christiaan Huygens. He was able to determine the period of rotation of Mars to 24 h 39 min.

He also discovered R Hydrae, a variable star. He realized that the visible during a total solar eclipse corona belongs to the sun.

From 1700 to 1718 he participated in the French degree measurement.

In 1710 he discovered that the diamond-shaped panels of honeycomb always show the same angle, namely, 109 ° 28 ' for the blunt and 70 ° 32' for the acute angle.

1723 he observed - as eight years earlier Joseph -Nicolas Delisle - a wave- optical effect but largely forgotten and made ​​theoretically explicable only almost one hundred years later at the French Academy of Sciences by Augustin -Jean Fresnel, determined by Siméon Denis Poisson was detected by François Arago again and is now usually referred to as Poisson's spot.