Gottfried Kirch

Gottfried Kirch, who lived from 1639 to 1710, was a German astronomer, the first Astronomer Royal in Berlin and director of the fledgling Berlin Observatory. The son of a shoemaker in Guben, he first worked as a village schoolmaster and calendar maker before learning astronomy from Erhard Weigel in Jena and from Hevelius in Danzig. He invented a screw micrometer in 1679, discovered a comet in 1680 that bears his name, found the Wild Duck Cluster M 11 in 1681 and the variable star chi Cygni in 1686, and with his second wife Maria Margaretha Winkelmann found the globular cluster M 5 in 1702. Because he long lacked a post he lived by publishing almanacs, at times as many as thirteen a year, which carried Enlightenment ideas to ordinary readers and attacked astrological prophecy. In 1700 he became the first astronomer of the Brandenburg society of sciences in Berlin.