He served as an assistant astronomer for a government expedition to
survey the
U.S-
Canada–United States border. In 1876 he became the directory of the
Dudley Observatory in Schenectady, New York. Boss is noted for his work in cataloguing the locations and
proper motions of stars. He also led an expedition to
Chile in 1882 to observe the
transit of
Venus, and catalogued information concerning
cometary
orbits. He was elected to the United States
National Academy of Sciences in 1889. His most significant discovery was the calculation of the convergent point of the
Hyades star cluster. He was awarded the
Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1905. He became editor of the
Astronomical Journal in 1909, and the following year published
Preliminary General Catalogue of 6188 Stars for the Epoch 1900, a
compilation of the proper motions of stars. He was elected to both the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the
American Philosophical Society in 1911. Following his death, responsibility for the
Astronomical Journal passed to his son,
Benjamin Boss. Benjamin continued to edit the journal until 1941 and also expanded his father's star catalogue, publishing the
Boss General Catalogue in 1936. ==Death and legacy==