Guido Horn d'Arturo (13 February 1879 – 1 April 1967) was an Italian astronomer born in Trieste, then part of the Austrian Empire. He obtained Italian citizenship after serving as a volunteer in the Italian army during the First World War. To avoid being persecuted as an irredentist by the Austrian authorities, he officially added to his surname Horn that of "d'Arturo" which he used in the war. He was director of the Observatory of Bologna from 1921 to 1954, with an interruption of over six years following the persecution for fascist racial laws. In 1931 he founded the magazine Coelum for the
Guido Horn d'Arturo (13 February 1879 – 1 April 1967) was an Italian astronomer born in Trieste, then part of the Austrian Empire. He obtained Italian citizenship after serving as a volunteer in the Italian army during the First World War. To avoid being persecuted as an irredentist by the Austrian authorities, he officially added to his surname Horn that of "d'Arturo" which he used in the war.
He was director of the Observatory of Bologna from 1921 to 1954, with an interruption of over six years following the persecution for fascist racial laws. In 1931 he founded the magazine Coelum for the dissemination of astronomy in the society.
The asteroid 3744, discovered in 1983, bears the name "Horn-d'Arturo".
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Guido Horn d'Arturoa adăugat o fotografie
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Segmented mirror telescope In the 1930s, Horn d'Arturo created the tessellated telescope, a progenitor of segmented mirror telescopes. In 1932 Horn d'Arturo began to work on a new idea of combining small mirror tassels, to build a larger telescope mirror. The difficulty of building high quality monolithic glass mirrors with diameters bigger than a few meters was becoming apparent during the development of the 5m Palomar telescope. These mirrors were in any case too expensive for the Italian economy, still struggling after the great depression of 1929. Horn's idea was to build smaller mirrors of the same spherical section of the larger one in which they would be combined so that the rays reflected by the single elements would converge in the same focal plane and produce a single image of each star in the field of view. This way, spherical aberration would be eliminated, together with other aberrations characteristic of spherical mirrors: a pioneering idea of active optics, commonly used nowadays in modern telescopes. In 1935, Horn d'Arturo constructed a 1 m prototype. Some years later in 1952, he assembled a larger 1.8 meter diameter telescope consisting of 61 tassels, which was installed in the astronomical tower in Bologna.…
