Spiridon Gopčević (Serbian Cyrillic: Спиридон Гопчевић; 9 July 1855 – 1928), also known under the pseudonym Leo Brenner, was a Serbian-Austrian amateur astronomer, journalist, writer and historian born in Trieste. His works on the modern history of Serbia and the Balkans were written from a nationalist point-of-view.
Life Gopčević was born on 9 July 1855 in Trieste. He originated from the village of Podi near Herceg Novi, in Boka Kotorska (modern-day Montenegro), then a part of the Austrian Empire. Gopčević received his education in Vienna, after which he began his journalistic and writing career. He later became part of Serbian foreign service and worked as a diplomatic attaché in Berlin from 1886 to 1887 and Vienna from 1887 to 1890. He returned to his family's estate in Trieste in 1891, where he worked as a journalist for German-language newspapers. Gopčević's journalistic career ended in 1893 when he was imprisoned for his anti-regime articles. As a self-educated man in astronomy, he practiced the field and published works in it under the pseudonym Leo Brenner. In 1894, he founded an observatory called "Manora" in the town of what is now called Mali Lošinj in present-day Croatia. At this observatory, Gopčević used the 17.5 cm refractor telescope to make observations of planets. Gopčević published observational reports and gained respect among lunar and planetary specialists, such as Philipp Fauth and Percival Lowell. Per academics Ronald Stoyan and Klaus-Peter Schroeder, his reports were extremely detailed and often fictional. He initially published works in Journal of the British Astronomical Association and The English Mechanic and World of Science. However, when he began to produce results that seemed unrealistic to his contemporaries, such as claiming in the 1890s that the rotation time of Venus is 23 hours, 57 minutes and 36.2396 seconds, Mercury - 33.25 hours, Uranus - 8 hours and 17 minutes, his works were no longer accepted. After his observations received criticism, he made ad hominem attacks against his critics, with targets being French astronomer Camille Flammarion and his assistant Eugène Antoniadi. Gopčević even had a falling out with Lowell, and habitually abused the staff and equipment of the Vienna Observatory. His reputation was ruined due to this conduct. In 1898, the editor of the Astronomische Nachrichten, Heinrich Kreutz, refused to accept his submissions. Gopčević coped with this rejection by establishing his own monthly journal, Astronomische Rundschau (which he published and edited from 1899 to 1909), which served as a platform for self-promotion and allowed him to carry out personal vendettas against astronomers who disagreed with him. It occasionally featured fake endorsements of his work by luminaries. Many of the articles written by popular figures like Simon Newcomb, Thomas See, and Edward Barnard were copied from other journals. In 1902, he published the first observing guide of the deep-sky in German. His books on observational astronomy, Spaziergaenge durch das Himmelszelt (1898) and Beobachtungs-Objecte fuer Amateur-Astronomen (1902), had positive reception. According to astronomer Thomas Hockey, "Brenner published drawings of Jupiter that were well accepted", and "After being banned from many journals, Brenner published his own, which included invented endorsements from respected astronomers. Such trickery suggests his erroneous discoveries were not simply innocent errors but deceptions." Per Austrian historian Martin Stangl, he had "a nearly pathological craving for fame and recognition" in combination with an "overestimation of the possible." He became a strong supporter of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In 1909, he revealed his identity to the readers of his journal and announced that he would stop publishing the journal, sell his observatory and library, and leave astronomy. By then, his credibility was lost to almost all professional astronomers and he left the field. Philipp Fauth, who kept respecting him, wrote in his letters that Gopčević committed suicide, but the year and circumstances of his death are disputed. He possibly died in 1928 in Berlin. The crater Brenner on the Moon was named after his pseudonym. A new observatory was built on Mali Lošinj in 1993, and was named "Leo Brenner".
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