Philipp Johann Heinrich Fauth
Philipp Johann Heinrich Fauth (19 March 1867 – 4 January 1941) was a German elementary school teacher and astronomer who excelled in lunar research conducted during forty years in his observatories in Landstuhl (Palatinate, Germany) and later Grünwald (Bavaria).
By the unconditional defense of the unscientific glacial cosmogony or world ice theory conceived by Austrian engineer Hanns Hörbiger he succumbed to a mistake he did not admit all his life.
Philipp Fauth's area of work was the classical astronomy in the visible light spectrum, being primarily of an observational and descriptive nature, and was directed in particular to the Moon and its cartography, the so-called selenography, and the planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
"By 1899 Fauth had charted 2,532 previously undiscovered craterlets and rilles, and in another three years of work he had more than doubled this number ... A ruthless perfectionist, many of his drawings are marvels of accuracy in both proportion and in position.
"The depth of understanding of the nature of lunar topography demonstrated by Fauth was certainly far superior to that possessed by the vast majority of his contemporaries",[2]: 279 but he was not able to convince the astronomical community about this point.
Dobbins retorts that measurements of the infrared radiation emitted by the Moon already existed in his time, indicating that lunar temperatures were above freezing at noon sunlight exposure.
The large lunar atlas on a scale of 1:1 million (3.5 meters in diameter) Fauth sketched on 22 sheets over photographic and micrometer anchor points in decades of observation he could not finish anymore due to his death in 1941.
[6] Likewise, the U.S. Air Force had prepared by then lunar astronautical charts in traditional telescope observation at Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona in the same scale of 1:1 million in eight years work by a 22-member staff.
In 1923 Philipp Fauth was expelled from the Palatinate by the French occupation in response to the German passive resistance whereupon he was put to work in a Munich school.
[7][10] 1939, at the age of seventy-one, Fauth received a honorary professor recognition for his almost fifty years of scientific work at the instigation of Chief of SS Heinrich Himmler, being also president of the NS research organization Deutsches Ahnenerbe (German ancestral heritage).
[7] In 1920 Fauth was appointed honorary member of the German natural research association Pollichia, having been the founder and first editor (1904–1908) of the club magazine Pfälzische Heimatkunde (local history of Palatinate).
