Loewy became director of the Paris Observatory in 1896, reorganising the institution and establishing a department of physical astronomy. He further spent a decade working with Pierre Puiseux on an atlas of the Moon composed of 10,000 photographs, L’Atlas photographique de la Lune (1910), the definitive basis for lunar geography for over half a century. The crater Loewy on the Moon is named after him and asteroid 253 Mathilde is believed to be named after his wife.
He died in Paris at a government meeting of a sudden and unanticipated cardiac arrest.
^According to investigations by Anneliese Schnell (Maurice Loewy and the equatorial Coudé in Vienna, Astronomische Nachrichten, Vol. 330, Issue 6, p. 552-554 [1]), he was born in Vienna, because this city is, e.g., given in a French translation of his birth certificate. Vienna as his birthplace is also given in the obituaries, in most of the large encyclopedias, and in other sources. Some sources indicate, obviously wrongly, Pressburg or Marienbad as his place of birth.
