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Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (14 March, 1835 – July 4, 1910) was an Italian astronomer. He studied at the University of Turin and Berlin Observatory and worked for over forty years at Brera Observatory.
His niece Elsa Schiaparelli became a famed couturiere.
He observed objects in the solar system, and after observing Mars he named the "seas" and "continents". Beginning in 1877 he also believed he had observed long straight features he called canali in Italian, meaning "channels" but mistranslated as "canals". Many decades later these canals of Mars were definitively shown to be an optical illusion. He was also the first to demonstrate that the Perseid and Leonid meteor showers were associated with comets, and he discovered the asteroid 69 Hesperia on 26 April 1861.
Honors and Awards
* Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1872)
* Bruce Medal (1902)
Named after him
* Asteroid 4062 Schiaparelli
* The crater Schiaparelli on the Moon
* The crater Schiaparelli on Mars
Prolific Italian astronomer whose research ranged widely but whose name is forever associated with Mars, and the controversy over the Martian "canals" which, unwittingly, he helped to unleash. Born in Savigliano, Piedmont, Schiaparelli graduated from the University of Turin and studied at the Royal Observatory in Berlin under Johann Encke, discoverer of a short-period comet that now bears his name. After a brief spell at Pulkova Observatory in Russia, under Otto Wilhelm Struve (1819-1905) (Otto Struve's grandfather), he joined the staff of Milan's Brera Observatory in 1860 and became its director two years later. The small instruments at Brera led Schiaparelli to focus his research initially on meteors and comets. Indeed, probably his most important contribution to astronomy was his discovery that swarms of meteors, which give rise to annual showers on Earth, and comets follow similar paths through space. His reward for this breakthrough was the installation of a more powerful (8.6-in.) refractor at Brera which allowed him to engage in serious planetary work. He first wanted to test the powers of the new instrument, to see if it "possessed the necessary optical qualities to allow for the study of the surfaces of the planets." 1877 brought the ideal opportunity in the form a particularly favorable opposition of Mars. Schiaparelli prepared for it almost like a prize fighter, avoiding "everything which could affect the nervous system, from narcotics to alcohol, and especially ... coffee, which I found to be exceedingly prejudicial to the accuracy of observation."
What emerged from Schiaparelli's long hours at the eyepiece in September 1877 was the most (optimistically) detailed map of Mars ever published. With the additional features he filled in over the next decade, it became a standard reference in planetary cartography, still in use until the dawn of the space probe era, and the scheme he devised for naming major Martian features survives to this day. He used Latin and Mediterranean place names taken from ancient history, mythology, and the Bible. A light spot in the southern hemisphere, for example, he called Nix Olympia – the Snows of Olympus (now known to be the largest volcano in the solar system and rechristened Olympus Mons). The great triangular feature, first observed by Huygens in 1669, became Syrtis Major, while large, bright patches earned the picturesque labels of Elysium, Cydonia, Tharsis, and Thyle. What was most striking about Schiaparelli's original map, however, was a curious network of linear markings which crisscrossed the Martian surface and joined one dark area to another. These lines he referred to as canali and he named them after famous rivers, both fictional and real – Gehon, Hiddekel, and Phison from the rivers in the Garden of Eden, Lethes and Nepenthes from the underground realm of Hades, and Ganges, Euphrates, and Nilus from actual geography.