Maximilianus Hell (1720-1792) - Munin

Despite radical changes in the institutional organisation of science in the Habsburg lands in
the wake of the year 1773, the Imperial and Royal Observatory of Vienna remained intact.
The number of assistants may have been reduced, but the court astronomer himself sat safe in
his chair. Whilst his colleagues abroad feared that the Ephemerides might be discontinued or
the Imperial Observatory shut down, 354 nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the annual
volumes of the Viennese ephemeris were churned out of the press as before, with supplements
presenting long lists of observations as well as theoretically ambitious treatises.
Two hundred meters away, however, the Jesuit Observatory of Vienna was closed shortly
after the suppression of the Society. The director Liesganig, whom we met in Subsection
I.2.2.1 above, was appointed professor at the former Jesuit collegium of Galician Leopolis, 355
which had come under Austrian rule in the aftermath of the first partition of Poland in
1772. 356 From his base in Leopolis, Liesganig conducted extensive surveys of the new
Habsburg province of Galicia and served as the director of an observatory that had been
founded by the Jesuits around 1769. 357 As Liesganig passed away in 1799, he left a large
collection of manuscripts from his surveys in Galicia. He did not, however, publish any
observations from Leopolis in the Ephemerides Astrononomicae edited by Hell and
Triesnecker. Back in Vienna, the Jesuit observatory seems not to have been manned at all
after Liesganig’s departure for Leopolis in 1774. In a letter to Weiss, dated Vienna 12
November 1783, Hell explains that 358
I have managed to save the observatory of the Viennese academic collegium,
which surely, in case I had been absent from Vienna at that time, would have
354 See for example Bernoulli 1776b, pp. 9-10.
355 Leopolis (L) = Lemberg (G), Lwów (Polish), L’vov (Russian), L’viv (Ukrainian). Udías mistakedly locates
“Lemberg” to Alsace in France (sic! Udías 2003, p. 31).
356 The Jesuit collegium of Leopolis was founded in 1661, received papal approbation as a university as late as
the year 1759, a status it lost in 1773. For the next decade, it was known as the Theresianum, or academy for
noblemen, until Joseph II renewed its university status in 1784.
357 The observatory is missing entirely in Howse 1986. Udías conjectures that this observatory was founded by
Liesganig (Udías 2003, p. 31). However, Brosche 2009a, p. 25 includes an engraving of “das Observatorium des
Jesuiten-Collegs 1771” (“the observatory of the Jesuit collegium, 1771”) and an official webpage of the Ministry
of Education and Science of Ukraine gives the year of founding as 1769
http://www.lnu.edu.ua/Subdivisions/PROPERTY/astro/astro_eng_bg.htm (accessed 30 May 2011). According to
Fischer 1984, pp. 139 & 147, a Ludowicus Hoszowski SJ (1732-post 1773) served as professor of mathematics
at the Jesuit collegium in Leopolis from 1769 to 1773. During 1771-73, Hoszowski was also entered in the Jesuit
catalogues as Professor astronomiae and Praefectus musei mathematici at the same collegium, but he left for an
ecclesiastical post in Przemyslia after the suppression and seems never to have become part of the team around
Liesganig (ibid.).
358 Hell to Weiss, dated Vienna 12 November 1783 (Vargha priv.): “Speculam Colegij Academici Viennensis a
Cæsare conservatam obtinui, quæ certissime, si Viennâ id temporis abfuissem, sublata, et deposita fuisset, eo,
quod Architectus verba Cæsaris male interpretatus fuerit”.
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