Philipp Fauth

Thanks to the generosity of Dale Cruikshank and Bill Sheehan, I am now the happy owner of several documents from a distant relative and a renowned lunar cartographer, Phillip Fauth. As some of you you know, my mother's maiden name was Fauth and the astronomer was her cousin. Unfortunately she did not get to know him well since she lived in the then-free state of Danzig (now Gdansk) in far eastern Prussia, while Phillip lived mainly in south- western Germany. Travel by train at that time (1920-30s) was long and costly and seldom done.
Although, as Bill Sheehan has so well documented in his outstanding book Epic Moon, Fauth was a superb observer, but unfortunately he had some very strange ideas about cosmology that did not do his reputation much good in later life. I have attached scans of one of his excellent renditions of the prominent lunar  crater Eratosthenes and a letter he wrote to Yerkes Observatory in 1928.
Bill also gave me booklet of Fauth's observation of Jupiter and Mars (dated 1925) but covering several decades of work..  His drawings of both planets are incredibly detailed and he even recorded detail on Jupiter's moons. Although he does not specify in this report which telescope he used, his observations were mainly done at his private observatory which contained several first rate instruments including  6.5, 7 refractors and a 15-inch apochromatic refractor.
As Bill points out so well in his book, that was the golden age of visual observing of the moon and planets, and Fauth was clearly one of its great practitioners before the arrival of high resolution photography.