Johann Galle

Johann Gottfried Galle was a German astronomer who, on September 23, 1846, became the first person to observe and identify the planet Neptune, working at the Berlin Observatory with his assistant Heinrich Louis d'Arrest. Galle made the observation the same night he received a letter from the French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier giving predicted coordinates for an unseen planet, and found the object within about one degree of that prediction. Earlier in his career, working at the Berlin Observatory under Johann Franz Encke from 1835 to 1851, Galle had discovered Saturn's inner dark ring in 1838 and three comets between 1839 and 1840. He received his doctorate in 1845 and went on to direct the Breslau Observatory from 1851, serving as professor of astronomy there for more than forty five years and publishing over two hundred works on planetary orbits, meteors, auroras and Earth's magnetic field. Despite his role in the observation, Galle always refused to be called the discoverer of Neptune, attributing the discovery to Le Verrier calculations.