Joseph Plassmann: Himmelskunde

Dark blue book cover. At the top golden title. Below the title is a golden picture of the sky with the swan constellation. The outlines of a swan are drawn over the constellation with red colour. At the bottom is the author’s name written in blue.

Joseph Plassmann: Himmelskunde
Freiburg : Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1913.

Joseph Plassmann (1859 -1940) was a German astronomer. He studied variable stars, i.e. stars whose brightness changes over time. His books on astronomy were widely popular. Plassmann was professor of astronomy and director of the observatory at the University of Münster.

He studied mathematics and astronomy in the spirit of the times in several cities: Münster, Würzburg and Bonn. He received his doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1904. He wrote his doctoral thesis on one of the largest known stars, the Garnet Star, named by William Herschel in 1783.

He worked in the German city of Münster, first as a secondary school teacher and later as a university lecturer and professor of astronomy at the University of Münster. In addition to variable stars, he studied meteorites and wrote numerous articles on these subjects for professional journals. His most famous work, Himmelskunde, was first published in 1898. The Lundmark collection’s copy is of the third revised edition published in 1913.