Christoph Scheiner

 

Christoph Scheiner was born on July 25th in 1573 in Wald near Mindelheim in Schwaben or Swabia, a region in the southwest of Munich. He is probably the most famous astronomer ever working in Ingolstadt.

From 1610 to 1616 he was a professor of mathematics at the University of Ingolstadt, where he already had been studying.

His scientific works dealing with questions of astronomy and optics, e.g. the sunspots and the human eye, were highly esteemed by experts.

Assisted by Johann Baptist Cysat he discovered the sunspots in March 1611. He described his observations in three letters he sent to Marcus Welser in Augsburg, who gave them to Galilei and Kepler. This caused a conflict between Scheiner and Galilei, who also claimed that he had discovered the sunspots in August 1610.

Many astronomic observations like the calculating the rotation of the sun time or the aptitudes of the sun’s rotation axis against the ecliptic are due to Christoph Scheiner.

He built an astronomic telescope on his own, invented the Pantograph  (a machine that makes it possible to copy things exactly by hand) and constructed apparatuses like the Helioskop ( a telescope that makes the sun look a bit darker, in order to protect your eyes) and the Helitrop.

His main work about the sunspots was edited in 1630: »Rosa Ursina sive sol ex admirando facularum suarum phaenomeno varius nec non circa centrum suum et axem fixum ab ortu in occasum conversione quasi menstrua super polos proprios mobilis« (Bracciano)."

On July 18th in 1650 he died in Neisse, a town in former Bohemia, now Poland.



School and building

 

The school was founded as a vocational school in 1858. It was in a different building then and there were only 34 students.

19 years later it became the “Royal Bavarian Secondary Modern School".

In 1903 a commercial school was included and only three years after that the number of pupils increased to 234 so that a bigger building had to be planned. This building was finished in 1912 when the first school year started, with about 326 pupils in today’s school building. The first girls came in 1920 and even though there were just 10 of them that year meant a great success for female emancipation.

In 1923 the school became a grammar school.

In 1940 there were the first dead students because of the Second World War. The principal, 15 teachers and the janitor were engaged in military services. The school then was called “Higher Secondary Modern School For Boys”.

Four years later, when World War II demanded the deaths of thousands of people and hundreds of pupils in the Ingolstadt area, the school was moved to St. Anton School in a different part of the city. That was because the school building was needed as a military hospital.

1945 was the first school year after the war. The school was again located in its own building and it was celebrating the end of the war. There were 744 pupils, but no girls. In the following year the school got back his old name and was again a grammar school opened for girls and boys.

Continually increasing numbers of students led to the first extension of the main building in 1956.

In 1965 the school got the name it still has today: Christoph-Scheiner-Gymnasium.

With ever increasing numbers of pupils attending the school there was the decision to start another extension in 2002. Construction began in the summer of 2003 to be finished by the end of the school year 2004-2005.