Joseph Jean Pierre Laurent
French astronomer (1823–1900)
Joseph Jean Pierre Laurent (or Joseph Laurent) (died 1900) was a French amateur astronomer and chemist who discovered the asteroid 51 Nemausa in 1858, for which he was a recipient of the Lalande Prize awarded by the French Academy of Sciences. It is also likely that he is the same person as the person of that name who provided chemistry assistance to photography pioneer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in 1853.
He never made any more asteroid discoveries and not much is known about him. He was described as a "very skillful young man" (un jeune homme très habile) by Édouard Stephan. He was described as a "distinguished pupil of the Marseille school", and as an amateur astronomer and an inspector of the assay office in Nîmes (contrôleur du bureau de garantie de Nîmes).
The asteroid was discovered using the private observatory at the house formerly occupied by Benjamin Valz, who left in 1836 to become the new director of the Marseille Observatory. He entrusted his former observatory to Laurent, who later found the asteroid. The house, at 32 rue Nationale in Nîmes (at that time known as rue de l'Agau), has a plaque commemorating the discovery.
Laurent was awarded the Lalande Prize of the French Academy of Sciences in 1858 for his discovery, jointly with five other asteroid and comet discoverers. In addition, asteroid 162 Laurentia was named in his honour.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joseph Jean Pierre Laurent” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.