Bode, Johann Elert

Johann Elert Bode, (born Jan. 19, 1747, Hamburg [Germany]—died Nov. 23, 1826, Berlin), German astronomer best known for his popularization of Bode’s law, or the Titius-Bode rule, an empirical mathematical expression for the relative mean distances between the Sun and its planets.

Bode founded in 1774 the well-known Astronomisches Jahrbuch (“Astronomic Yearbook”), 51 yearly volumes of which he compiled and issued. He became director of the Berlin Observatory in 1786 and withdrew from official life in 1825. Among his other publications was Uranographia (1801), a collection of 20 star maps accompanied by a catalog of 17,240 stars and nebulae. In 1776 he propounded a theory of the solar constitution similar to that developed in 1795 by Sir William Herschel. He gave currency to the empirical rule known as Bode’s law, which was actually announced by Johann Daniel Titius of Wittenberg in 1766. This law was an important factor in the discovery of the minor planets, most of which are located between Mars and Jupiter.