Lewis Boss

Lewis Boss (1846–1912) was an American Astronomer.

He was born in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1870 he graduated from Dartmouth College, then went to work as a clerk for the U.S. Government. He served as an assistant astronomer for a government expedition to survey the U.S-Canadian border. In 1876 he became the directory of the Dudley Observatory in Schenectady, New York.

Lewis Boss is noted for his work in cataloguing the locations and proper motions of stars. He also led an expedition to Chile in 1882 to observe the transit of Venus, and also catalogued information concerning cometary orbits.

In 1910, he published Preliminary General Catalogue of 6188 Stars for the Epoch 1900, a compilation of the proper motions of stars. This catalog was later expanded after his death. His most significant discovery was the calculation of the convergent point of the Hyades star cluster.

The Boss crater on the Moon is named after him.

External links

• Much of this article was based on the Dudley Observatory history of Lewis Boss.