Famous Astronomers

  • 1473

    Nicolaus Copernicus

    He Proposed Earth orbited the Sun contradicting the long held belief that the Sun orbited the Earth laying the groundwork for Galileo and Kepler.
  • 1546

    Tycho Brahe

    He recorded the Super Nova of 1572, where he discovered it had no diurnal parallax, proving it was beyond the Moon and plotted the motion of the comet of 1577.
  • 1564

    Galileo Galilei

    He resolved the stars in the Milky Way, discovered sunspots and measured the Sun’s rotation
  • 1571

    Johannes Kepler

    He used Brahe’s precise data to get his three laws of planetary elliptical motion
  • Giovanni Domenico Cassini

    Measured Mars and Jupiter rotation periods and was the first to get scientific records of zodiacal light and investigated atmospheric refraction.
  • Edmond Halley

    He discovered Omega Centauri, paid for publishing Newton’s Principia and using Newton’s gravitational law predicted the comet of 1682.
  • Herschel William

    The discoverer of Uranus and several moons of Saturn and Uranus, discovered that some double stars orbit each other and discovered infrared radiation.
  • Pierre-Simon Laplace

    suggested the solar system evolved from a large, flattened cloud of gas and published differential equations describing planetary orbits and tides
  • Heinrich Olbers

    He discovered several comets and searched for a missing planet between Mars and Jupiter and discovered Pallas and Vesta suggesting these were fragments of the missing planet, formulated Olber’s Paradox.
  • Friedrich Bessel

    The father of modern astrometry published first accurate stellar parallax and discovered orbital deflections of Sirius and Procyon from unseen white dwarfs.