Antal Tass

* Temesrékás, April 14, 1876 – † Budapest, January 17, 1937 / astronomer, employee of the Ógyalla ; observatory ; ; He completed his studies in astronomy and mathematics at the Budapest University of Science and Technology. In 1899, he was an assistant at the Ógyalla Observatory, in 1904 its observatory, in 1913 its deputy director, and after the death of Miklós Konkoly Thege (1916), the head of the institute. In 1920, he and Lajos Terkán saved most of the instruments of the Ógyalla Observatory to Budapest and organized the new observatory, the Konkoly Foundation Astrophysical Observatory (1921) on Sváb Hill (today's Szabadság Hill), of which he was the director until 1934. At first, he made sunspot and meteor observations, later he observed variable stars and worked on determining the brightness of stars. Several of his articles and independent works were published in Hungary and abroad. In 1924, he founded the Stella Astronomical Society with József Wodetzky for astronomy enthusiasts. In addition to observing the brightness of numerous variable stars, the primary result of his work is the brightness catalogue of stars stronger than 7.5 orders of magnitude in the celestial zone 10 degrees south of the celestial equator. He was keen on dealing with questions of astronomical history. As an introduction to the aforementioned catalogue, he wrote the history of astronomical photometry, and then the history of the observation of variable stars. At the same time, he also presented a short but meaningful summary of the development of astronomical photography. These writings of his were also published in German and are still valuable sources today. In the 1920s and 1930s, he published several detailed studies on the history of astronomy in Hungary. ; ; His main works: ; Photometry of the Southern Starry Sky (with Lajos Terkán), 1916), ; Data on the History of Astronomy, 1920.