Charles Lassovszky

* Gyetva, March 23, 1897 – † Boston, December 20, 1961 / astronomer, geophysicist, university professor ; ; He began his schooling in his native village, attended high school in Bánya Beszterce, then in Losonc, where he graduated in 1915. He earned a doctoral degree in astronomy, physics, and mathematics from the University of Budapest in 1920. From 1918 to 1921, he worked as an intern and then as an assistant at the University Earthquake Observatory. From 1921, he was a colleague of the Konkoly-Thege Astronomical Observatory in Svábhegy, which was moved to Budapest, and from 1938 he was its director. From 1943 to 1950, he worked as a public full-time professor at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Budapest. In 1951–1955 he was a scientific associate at the State Geophysical Institute. Already in 1925 he spent a year with a Rockefeller scholarship at the largest observatories in the USA (Harvard, Yerkes, Lick, Mt. Wilson) and in Canada, at the Victoria Observatory. In the 1930s he visited Germany, England, Denmark and Sweden. He also participated in a South American solar eclipse expedition. He was a member of numerous professional organizations and societies in Hungary and abroad. He was a prolific author of various professional journals, and he edited the Astronomical Journals for six years, and he also edited the first Hungarian-language Astronomical Lexicon for publication. His research field was primarily the calculation and interpretation of data based on photometric observations of variable and binary stars. He emigrated to the USA when he was almost sixty, following the events in Hungary in 1956. From 1958 to 1961, he was a member of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, where he was head of the Photoreduction Department. There, he became involved in the use of computer programs for tracking satellites and in orbit data calculations. Several technical devices were designed based on his suggestions (e.g., the two-screw comparator). It was largely due to his merit that the orbit data calculations, which previously took several hours, were reduced to a few minutes, while the accuracy also increased.