Born Zagarolo near Rome, Italy, 22 May 1749
Died Rome, Italy, 24 December 1827
Giuseppe Calandrelli served as the astronomer of the former Jesuit Collegio Romano during the period of the suppression of the Society of Jesus. As such he was Rome’s preeminent astronomer in the first decades of the nineteenth century. His work was traditional positional astronomy, including observations of comets and eclipses and accurate measurements of stellar positions and motions. He was one of the early claimants to the detection of annual stellar parallax, and his work in that area was significant in the Church’s eventual removal, by 1820, of restrictions regarding the teaching of Copernicanism.
Calandrelli was the son of Tommaso Calandrelli and Maria Fortini. He received a philosophical and theological education at the Vatican and Albano seminaries leading to the priesthood, but he developed an interest in mathematics and astronomy and studied them deeply on his own. After teaching at the seminary...
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Selected References
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Lattis, J.M. (2014). Calandrelli, Giuseppe. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_226
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