Pavel Mayer

Czech Republic

1932-2018

Obituary:

Stellar astronomer and a noble man
Dr. Pavel Mayer has passed away

On November 7, 2018, on the very day of his 86th birthday, Dr. Pavel
Mayer, a Czech stellar astronomer and a senior staff member of the Astronomical
Institute of Charles University, has passed away. Pavel Mayer was born on
November 7, 1932 in a small cozy town Libochovice, in the North-West Bohemia.
His ancestors lived there for several centuries and Pavel was returning there all
his life, since he had there a workshop, where he built photoelectric photometers
and telescopes.

He studied at the secondary schools in Roudnice and later in Louny. He was
educated in astronomy at the Astronomical Institute of Charles University at
the faculty of Mathematics and Physics, where he then spent all his professional
life.

He was mainly active in two areas. The first one was building of astronomical
instruments. He designed and constructed two 0.65 m reflectors, the first one
is still in service in the Ondrejov Observavory, and the other at Hvar, Croatia.
Pavel designed also several photoelectric photometers, which have been used
at several observatories. For instance, with his photometers at Hvar, almost
100000 UBV and UBVR observations of various stars have been secured up to
the present time.

The second topic of his astronomical research were binaries and multiple
systems with hot components. He became well known after his discovery of
the eclipsing binary IU Aurigae with secularly variable depths of its eclipses,
which he correctly interpreted as a dynamical variation of the orbit caused be
the disturbing effect of the third body in the system. Another discovery was
the massive eclipsing system LY Aur, with an observationally uneasy orbital
period very close to 4 days. Later, he was mainly interested in hot systems with
components evolved away from the main sequence, for which the knowledge of
their basic physical properties was quite incomplete.

His research had been conducted in a broad international collaboration. He
spent a year at the Yerkes Observatory, where he was helping to Dr. O'Dell
to put into operation a small telescope equipped with a spectrograph aimed to
studies of planetary nebulae. During this stay, he got the chance to observe at
Kitt Peak and McDonald Observatories.

His very fruitful collaboration with the Bamberg astronomer Horst Drechsel
and his student Reinald Lorenz continued for many years, up to the present
time. They were quite successful with the applications for observing time at the
ESO telescopes in Chile. More recently, he also collaborated with Rolf Chini
and his students from Bochum and all the time also with Hrvoje Bozic from
Hvar. Pavel's contacts with prof. Randic in 1968 actually started the plan to
build a joint, at that time Czechoslovak-Yugoslavian Observatory at the Hvar
Island.

His admirable vitality and scientific productivity is well documented by the
fact that since 2012, when he celebrated his 80th birthday, until now he has
been co-author of 16 original studies, the first author of six of them and a very
active contributor to all of them. Until 2015 he was also teaching a semestral
course on binaries. He was helping by advice to many students, including some
foreign ones.

In spite of all his achievements, Pavel Mayer was an extraordinarily modest
person with a sense of English humour and with a very kind and noble behaviour.
He loved his family and was always ready to help. He will be missed very much
by all of us.