Bode, Johann Elert (1747-1826)

German astronomer and mathematician. He contributed greatly to the popularization of astronomy. He published the first atlas of all stars visible to the naked eye, Uranographia (1801), and popularized Bode's law.

Bode, born in Hamburg, taught himself astronomy. In 1772 he joined the astronomical observatory of the Berlin Academy to help with the computations for the Astronomisches Jahrbuch, the German equivalent of the Nautical Almanac, a publication for which he remained responsible up to the time of his death. In 1786 he was made director of the Berlin observatory and a member of the Berlin Academy. He wrote several books on popular astronomy and worked on the compilation of two star atlases, Vorstellung der Gestirne and Uranographia, which described the positions of more than 17,000 stars and included for the first time some of the celestial bodies discovered by William Herschel. It was Bode who named Herschel's new planet Uranus.