On 1846 September 23, observing at the Berlin Observatory with the German astronomer Heinrich Ludwig d’Arrest (1822–75), he was the first to locate the planet Neptune, having started his search from a position supplied by U. J. J. Le Verrier. Galle observed Saturn’s faint ‘crêpe ring’ (the C Ring) in 1838, over a decade before W. C. Bond and G. P. Bond. He proposed that the solar parallax could be established from the parallax of asteroids, to which end he observed (8) Flora in 1873; the method was later used successfully by, in particular, D. Gill and H. Spencer Jones. His computations of cometary orbits helped to establish the connection between comets and meteor showers.