Pierre Puiseux

Pierre Henri Puiseux ( born July 20, 1855 in Paris, † September 28, 1928 ) was a French, partially active as a geologist astronomer. He became known primarily through the first photographic lunar atlas.

The son of the mathematician Victor Puiseux attended the École normale supérieure, before he became an astronomer at the Paris Observatory began its work in 1885.

He dealt first with the aberration of light, with the celestial mechanics (in particular the orbital motions of asteroids ) and the topography of the moon. In cooperation with the later observatory director Maurice Loewy and other observatories, he also worked on the ( never fully completed ) photographic sky survey Carte du Ciel. Lasting fame he gained through the Parisian moon Atlas (1896) and the Atlas de la Lune photographique from 1910 that were more than 50 years, the standard works of Selenografie and lunar mapping. For them, he and Loewy took more than 6,000 photographs of the moon.

In 1896, the Puiseux Lalande Prize of the Paris Academy of Sciences ( Académie des sciences ) and the 1900 Jules Janssen Award. In 1912 he was Academician in the section astronomy.

Like his father, he loved mountain climbing. In addition to many other peaks he has climbed Mont Blanc alone. On these occasions, he studied the geology of the mountains and used this knowledge for his theories on the formation of the lunar surface. Comparisons with terrestrial landforms and geological structures, he published in 1908 in his work La terre et la lune: forme et extérieure internal structure.

According to the researchers of the lunar crater is named Puiseux. It lies on the edge of the Mare Humorum, exactly opposite the Loewy crater.