Asaph Hall
OCT 15, 2015
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031072
It’s the birthday of Asaph Hall, who was born in 1829 in Goshen, Connecticut. In 1862, having worked at Harvard College Observatory, Hall joined the staff of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. At that time, USNO’s 26-inch refracting telescope was the world’s largest. In August 1877 Hall used the instrument to discover Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars (shown on the right in a 2009 image taken by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter). The Martian moons are named after the Greek mythological characters Phobos (panic) and Deimos (terror), whose father, Ares, was the god of war (Mars in Roman mythology).
Date in History: 15 October 1829
© 2015 American Institute of Physics
