Loys de Cheseaux was born on 4 May 1718 in
Lausanne,
Vaud, to Paul-Etienne Loys de Cheseaux, a
banneret, and Estienne-Judith de Crousaz. His brother was
Charles-Louis Loys de Cheseaux. He acquired a reputation in Europe as an astronomer with the publication of his
Traité de la Comète, Loys de Cheseaux discovered the comet
C/1746 P1. In 1746, he presented a list of
nebulae, eight of which were his own new discoveries, to the
French Academy of Sciences. The list was noted privately by
Le Gentil in 1759, but only made public in 1892 by
Guillaume Bigourdan. From 1747, Loys de Cheseaux was a
corresponding member of the science academies of
Göttingen,
Saint Petersburg and
Stockholm, as well as the
French Academy of Sciences and the
Royal Society of London. He was offered the post of director of the St. Petersburg observatory, but declined the invitation. In 1751, Loys de Cheseaux travalled to Paris and was presented to the Academy of Sciences. There he died, after a short illness, on 30 November 1751, aged 33. In addition to astronomy, Loys de Cheseaux researched
Biblical chronology, calculating the movements of the Sun and Moon relative to descriptions in the
Book of Daniel and the occurrence of
solstices and
equinoxes in
Jerusalem at the time of the
Old Testament story. In his
Dissertation Chronologique (1748), Loys de Cheseaux tried to establish the date of the
eclipse known as "
crucifixion darkness" in order to determine the date of the
crucifixion of Jesus. == References ==