Astronomical works 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. Fauth was the last representative of a school of German selenographers, whose most important representatives were
Tobias Mayer (1723–1762),
J. Hieronymus Schroeter (1745–1816),
Wilh. Gotthelf Lohrmann (1796–1840),
J. Heinrich Mädler(1794–1874) and
J.F. Julius Schmidt (1825–1884). After the death of
Nepomuk Krieger, Munich-Gern, Germany, in 1902, Fauth emerged as the leading German selenographer (Moon cartographer) of his time. Fauth's became best known for his drawings of lunar landscapes and his lunar maps. A (good) drawing at the time was superior to a photographic picture, especially when displaying large differences in brightness and very fine structures which could not be resolved well due to air turbulence by photography; moreover, it allowed to remove image defects or cast shadows from the image, change perspectives and do other image edits not possible with photographs at the time. "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. A much debated question at the time was that of changes on the Moon. Again and again alleged changes on the Moon surface based on volcanism or lunar atmosphere were reported which had always been rigorously rejected by Fauth as errors of observation. Fauth's map of the Moon was the last and largest ever published by a single researcher by telescopic observation of the Moon, leaving aside Fauth's direct predecessor, the disputed map published 1951 by Welsh engineer
Hugh Percy Wilkins who made use of contributions from other authors and found a harsh appraisal e.g. by E. Both: "Neither positional nor artistic quality was at all commensurate with the quantity of detail represented" 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 1913 the 772-page standard work to WEL ''Hörbiger's Glacial-Kosmogonie'' With the support and defense of WEL, Fauth succumbed to a mistake he did not want to admit as long as he lived. 1939, at the age of seventy-one, Fauth received an 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). In the same year 1939 Fauth was appointed member of the
International Astronomical Union (IAU) to Commission 16 "Physical Observations of the Planets and Satellites". In
Kaiserslautern,
Landstuhl,
Bad Dürkheim and
Grünwald streets were named after Fauth.
Time of National Socialism In 1937 Philipp Fauth sold his private observatory at Grünwald to the national socialist (NS) research association
Deutsches Ahnenerbe (German ancestral heritage) and continued his research as an employee of the Ahnenerbe until his death in 1941. In the Ahnenerbe, Fauth continued his work on the large Moon atlas and the WEL. Alongside he proposed the setup of people ("Volks") observatories, telescopes and microscopes, but the plans were stalled soon after outbreak of
World War II. By joining the Ahnenerbe, Fauth who had worked alone for all his life (having a short-time assistant paid by the Ahnenerbe for the first time) wanted to secure the future of his valuable telescope too. This intention failed, the instrument was lost in the turmoil of World War II. == Publications (selection) ==