Miklós Konkoly-Thege and Károly Lukács

Miklós Konkoly-Thege came from a noble family and completed secondary school as a private pupil. He attended university in Pest and Berlin, then built an observatory on his estate at Ógyalla to devote his life to astronomy. In his time, Mars could only be observed through a powerful telescope. Detecting red and less-red surface regions required sharp eyes, drawing them required a steady hand, and clear weather prevented atmospheric currents from blurring the image. On 29 October 1879 he recorded: “Since I began examining the surface of Mars, I have never seen markings outlined as exceptionally sharply as today. … Mars appears blood-red. The largest marking lies near the planet’s equator and extends almost to a point towards the northern edge of the disc, but before disappearing it breaks once, and its detached part curves eastward. Like a polyp, it has two branches extending east and west.” Only spacecraft, eighty years later, could reveal what these markings were.

Károly Lukács attended university in Budapest and Paris, graduating in geography and history. He then worked at the Ógyalla observatory, observing Mars and publishing papers in 1904 at age 22. For a competition entry he copied Percival Lowell’s map of the Martian polar region and supplemented it with his own observations in the text. Camille Flammarion, one of the era’s leading astronomers, encouraged him to continue. The First World War and subsequent revolutions interrupted his career; he later became a researcher of Lake Balaton. Exactly why he abandoned planetary observations is unknown.