Hans Schjellerup

Hans Carl Frederik Christian Schjellerup (8 February 1827 – 13 November 1887) was a Danish astronomer.

Initially he was apprenticed as a watch maker, but in 1848 he passed the entrance exam for the Polytechnic School of Copenhagen.

He also began a study of Arabic, Chinese and other oriental languages, and used his knowledge to study old astronomic records, including those of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī (whose Book of Fixed Stars he translated into French in 1874) and Chinese records of eclipses.

In 1869, he drafted a proposal for a Chinese telegraph dictionary, with each of 5,454 characters being assigned a number.

At the University of Copenhagen he became director of the observatory, serving in that capacity up until his death, following a lengthy illness.