Auguste Charlois
Encyclopedia
Auguste Honoré Charlois (November 26, 1864 – March 26, 1910) was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 astronomer
Astronomer
An astronomer is a scientist who studies celestial bodies such as planets, stars and galaxies.Historically, astronomy was more concerned with the classification and description of phenomena in the sky, while astrophysics attempted to explain these phenomena and the differences between them using...

 who discovered 99 asteroid
Asteroid
Asteroids are a class of small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun. They have also been called planetoids, especially the larger ones...

s while working in Nice.

His first discovery was the asteroid 267 Tirza
267 Tirza
267 Tirza is a fairly sizeable, very dark Main belt asteroid.It was discovered by Auguste Charlois on May 27, 1887 in Nice. It was his first asteroid discovery.It was named after Tirzah, a woman in the Bible.- References :...

 in 1887. He photographed 433 Eros
433 Eros
433 Eros is a near-Earth asteroid discovered in 1898, and the first asteroid to be orbited by a probe . It is an S-type asteroid approximately 34.4×11.2×11.2 km in size, the second-largest NEA after 1036 Ganymed, and belongs to the Amor group.Eros is a Mars-crosser asteroid, the first known...

 on the very night of its discovery by Gustav Witt, but was not able to act quickly enough before Witt announced his find.

Although he started searching for asteroids in the era of visual detection, by 1891 Max Wolf
Max Wolf
Maximilian Franz Joseph Cornelius Wolf was a German astronomer and a pioneer in the field of astrophotography...

 had pioneered the use of astrophotography
Astrophotography
Astrophotography is a specialized type of photography that entails recording images of astronomical objects and large areas of the night sky. The first photographs of an astronomical object were taken in the 1840s, but it was not until the late 19th century that advances in technology allowed for...

 to drastically speed up the rate of detection of asteroids, and both Wolf and Charlois separately discovered far more asteroids than would have been feasible by visual detection.

At the age of 46, he was murdered by his brother-in-law (the brother of his first wife), who held a grudge against him because he had remarried. The man was found guilty and given a life sentence of hard labor in New Caledonia
New Caledonia
New Caledonia is a special collectivity of France located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, east of Australia and about from Metropolitan France. The archipelago, part of the Melanesia subregion, includes the main island of Grande Terre, the Loyalty Islands, the Belep archipelago, the Isle of...

.

The asteroid 1510 Charlois
1510 Charlois
1510 Charlois is a main-belt asteroid discovered on February 22, 1939 by André Patry at Nice.- External links :*...

 was named in his honour.

Asteroids

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