He studied at the University of Göttingen (then in the Electorate of Hanover) from 1796 to 1798 under Abraham Gotthelf Kästner and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.
He attained his doctorate in 1800, and spent a short time teaching privately.
As an astronomer, he was noted for demonstrating that meteors occur in the upper atmosphere and thus not really a meteorological phenomenon.
In 1811 he became a professor of mathematics at the newly created University of Breslau, a merger of two Wrocław colleges.
In 1820 he published the first weather charts in Beiträgen zur Witterungskunde ("Contributions to Meteorology").