M. de Cheseaux’s book is out of print, difficult to produce or even consult. A copy exists in the library of the University of Lausanne,Switzerland and another at the British Museum, UK.
Jean-Philippe Loys de Cheseaux 1718-1751 an astronomer from Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1746 he presented a list of nebulae, eight of which were his own new discoveries, to the Académie Française des Sciences. The list was noted privately by Le Gentil in 1759, but only made public in 1892 by Guillaume Bigourdan. Cheseaux was among the first to state, in its modern form, what would later be known as Olbers’ paradox that, if the universe is infinite, the night sky should be bright.
Cheseaux also did some little-known research into Biblical chronology, attempting the date the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth by analysing astronomical observations in the Book of Daniel. This work was published posthumously in Mémoires posthumes de M. de Cheseaux 1754.
A wealthy Swiss landowner, mathematician and astronomer, De Chéseaux lived near Lausanne, where he was born on May 4, 1718. He had a private observatory with a simple 14-feet F.L. refractor, a 2-feet F.L. Gregorian reflector, as well as a quadrant which could measure to an acuracy of 15 minutes of arc.
He is famous for his observations of the comet he discovered on December 13, 1743 and observed 1743 until March 1744, although this had been first discovered on December 9 by Dirk Klinkenberg comet 1743 Klinkenberg or Klinkenberg-De Chéseaux, C/1743 X1, 1744. De Chéseaux describes this comet in depth, which became brighter than Jupiter and at one time exhibited no less than six tails. He originally discovered another comet two years later, on August 13, 1746: Comet 1746 De Chéseaux C/1746 P1, 1747.
In 1745 and 1746, De Chéseaux compiled a list of 21 nebulous objects, of which he had originally discovered 8 objects: IC 4665, NGC 6633, M16, M25, M35 (this one might have seen before by John Bevis in England), M71, M4, and M17. Moreover, he independently re-discovered M6, NGC 6231 and M22 . De Chéseaux sent this list to his grandfather, Reaumur, in Paris, and it was read by Reaumur at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences on August 6, 1746 and mentioned by Le Gentil 1759, but then stayed unpublished and more or less forgotten until Bigourdan recovered and published it within a larger paper in 1884 Bigourdan 1892.
De Chéseaux was among the first to formulate Olbers’ paradox.
De Chéseaux did not grow very old; he died on November 30, 1751 at age of only 33.