BODE, JOHANN ELERT (1747-1826), German astron omer, was born at Hamburg on Jan. 19 1747. He founded in the well-known Astronomisches Jahrbuch, 51 yearly volumes of which he compiled and issued. He became director of the Berlin observatory in 1786, withdrew from official life in 1825, and died at Berlin Nov. 23 1826. His other works include: Sammlung astronomischer Ta f eln (1776); Erlauterung . der Sternkunde (1776, 3rd ed. 1808) ; Uranographia (I801). a collection of 20 star-maps accompanied by a catalogue of 17,240 stars and nebulae. He propounded, in 1776, a theory of the solar constitution similar to that developed in 1795 by Sir William Herschel. He gave cur rency to the empirical rule known as "Bode's Law," which was actually announced by Johann Daniel Titius of Wittenberg in 1772. It is expressed by the statement that the proportionate distances of the several planets from the sun may be represented by adding 4 to each term of the series : o, 3, 6, 12, 24, etc. The irregularity will be noticed of the first term, which should be 1 instead of o (see PLANET).
See J. F. Encke, Berlin Abhandlungen (1827), p. xi. ; H. C. Schu macher, Astr. Nach. (1827), v. 2J5, 367; Poggendorff, Biog. literar isches Handworterbuch; Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, iii. i.