Both Canis Major and Puppis are treasure troves for the open cluster observer. And for the observer of small wonders the seldom-observed 26 Haffner open clusters they contain are a tremendous observing project. And as a special observing treat, Haffner 1 and 2 turned out to be Tombaugh 1 and 2 – discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1938.

In 1957 German astronomer Hans Haffner published his “New Galactic Star Clusters in the Southern Milky Way”, containing 26 new open clusters. He was serving as Director of the Boyden Observatory in Bloemfontein, South Africa (from 1955 to 1959) when European astronomers were using Bloemfontein as a base for exploring the potentialities of establishing the European Southern Observatory in South Africa. Whilst there he made photometric images of star clusters and produced atlases of the southern sky with blue and infrared images as well as of the southern Milky Way.

Hans Haffner (1912-1977)

1912: Hans Haffner was born in Nördlingen Bavaria, Germany on 8 November 1912.

1931 – 1933: He studied at the University of Munich before moving to the University of Göttingen in 1933.

1934: Haffner started working on his dissertation at the University of Göttingen, which was about the photographic photometry of the open star cluster Praesepe.

1939: Haffner was drafted, but fortuitously the director of the Munich observatory arranged for Haffner to be assigned to the newly founded Wendelstein observatory for solar monitoring.

After the war he returned to the Astronomical Institute of the University of Göttingen and resumed the photometric investigation of various star clusters.

1953: Haffner was appointed Professor of Astronomy at the University of Hamburg.

1955 to 1959: He Director at the Boyden Observatory in Bloemfontein, South Africa

1960: After his return to the Hamburg-Bergedorf Observatory, he became chairman of the Astronomische Gesellschaft.

1962 – 1967: Haffner provisionally took over the management of the University Observatory Hamburg-Bergedorf for Otto Heckmann who became director of the newly founded European Southern Observatory.

1967: Haffner was appointed to the newly established Chair of Astronomy at the University of Würzburg.

1971/72: He was in La Silla in Chile together with Otto Heckmann to put a new telescope at ESO into operation. Afterwards he travelled again to Bloemfontein for a research stay.

He died on 23 February 1977.