Research on Asteroids of Christian Ludwig Gerling and His Students in the Nineteenth Century

One of the major topics in astronomy at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the interpretation of the observations of the first asteroids. In 1810, Christian Ludwig Gerling at the age of 22 came to Göttingen University to continue his academic studies. Supervised by Carl Friedrich Gauß at the observatory, he was engaged in studies of theoretical and practical astronomy. Starting in 1812, Gerling accepted the responsibility for collecting observational data of the asteroid Vesta from the European observatories and for calculating the ephemeris of this new minor planet. In 1817, Gerling was appointed professor at Marburg University. One of his early astronomical projects in Marburg was his contribution to the Berliner Akademische Sternkarten. After completion of his observatory in 1841, Gerling’s students started observing and theoretically analysing the orbits of the continuously newly discovered asteroids including the perturbation of the larger solar system bodies. The observations at Gerling’s observatory are the first astrometric measurements of solar system’s minor bodies of Hesse.