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750 BCE
moon year cycle
Mayan astronemers discover a 18.6 year cycle of the moon -
467 BCE
eclipse
anaxagoras puts a correct explanation of the eclipse and explains the sun as a fiery mass -
387 BCE
plato
plato founds a school that will influence the next 2000 years and teaches everything in the universe moves in harmony and perfect circles. -
270 BCE
Aristarchus
aristarchus develops heliocentrism which puts the sun in the middle of the universe and the earth just another planet orbiting it -
galileo
galileo describes his findings with his new telescope he supports the fact of the sun being the center of the universe -
reflecting telescopes
Isaac newton produces the first reflecting telescopes -
Gravity
isaac newton produces his first book about gravity and the laws of motion -
Charles Messier
Charles poduces a book about star groups and nebulas he found to stop them from being reconised as comets. -
William Herschel
William Herschel splits sunlight through a prism and with a thermometer -
Giuseppe Piazzi
Giuseppe locates a small object between mars and jupiter which today is a dwarf planet -
Joseph Fraunhofer
Joseph builds the first accurate spectrometer and uses it to study the spectrum of the Sun's light. -
A new planet
A new planet, Neptune, is identified by German astronomer Johann Gottfried -
Space flight
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky publishes his first article on the possibility of space flight. -
Classifying stars
the Henry Draper Catalog is published. In the catalog, Annie Cannon proposes a sequence of classifying stars by the absorption lines in their spectra, which is still in use today. -
First Rocket
Robert Goddard launches the first rocket powered by liquid fuel. He also shows that a rocket can work in a vacuum. His later rockets break the sound barrier for the first time.