After finishing secondary school and three years of undergraduate studies in Budapest, Béla Harkányi went on to study one year in Leipzig, then in Strasbourg (teachers: F. Kohlrausch, E. Cohn, H. Kobold), occasionally visiting major astronomical institutes in Germany and the United States, including Lick Observatory.

Here he conducted observational photometry while he also developed an interest in theoretical astrophysics, under the influence of his friend and associate, Radó Kövesligethy.

[3][4] In 1903 he left Ógyalla and moved back to Budapest, where from 1907 he became Privatdozent in the Institute for Cosmography and Geophysics of the university, led by Radó Kövesligethy.

In the political upheaval following Austria-Hungary's 1918 military collapse, Harkányi was briefly nominated to be full professor during the short-lived communist dictatorship of 1919.

Using Vogel's (1880) spectrophotometric data, available at 7 or 8 wavelength values, Harkányi performed the fit and obtained Wien temperatures for 5 stars (Sirius, Vega, Arcturus, Aldebaran, and Betelgeuze).

In 1910 he further developed an earlier result by R. Kövesligethy,[9] deriving the relation between colour temperature and surface brightness of a star in the visual domain.