January 16: Johannes Schöner

Johannes Schöner

January 16, 1477 – January 16, 1547

Johannes Schöner was a renowned and respected German polymath. It is best to refer to him using the usual 16th century Latin term "mathematicus", as the areas of study to which he devoted his life were very different from those now considered to be the domain of the mathematician. He was a priest, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, cosmographer, cartographer, mathematician, globe and scientific instrument maker and editor and publisher of scientific tests.

In his own time he enjoyed a European-wide reputation as an innovative and influential globe maker and cosmographer and as one of the continents leading and most authoritative astrologers. Today he is remembered as an influential pioneer in the history of globe making and as a man who played a significant role in the events that led up to the publishing of Copernicus' "De revolutionibus" in Nürnberg in 1543.

Schöner had made still unpublished data of Mercury observations from Walther available to Copernicus, 45 observations in total, 14 of them with longitude and latitude. Copernicus used three of them in "De revolutionibus", giving only longitudes, and falsely attributing them to Schöner. The values differed slightly from the ones published by Schöner in 1544.

In 1538, Georg Joachim Rheticus, a young professor of mathematics at Wittenberg, stayed for some time with Schöner who convinced him to visit Nicolaus Copernicus in Frauenburg. In 1540, Rheticus dedicated the first published report of Copernicus work, the Narratio prima, to Schöner. As this was well received, Copernicus finally agreed to publish his main work, and Rheticus prepared Copernicus' manuscript for printing.

A crater on Mars is named in his honor.

October 17: Peter Nilson

Peter Nilson

October 17, 1937 – March 8, 1998

Peter Nilson was a Swedish astronomer and novelist. Active at Uppsala University, he compiled a catalogue of galaxies. He was appreciated for a number of essay books (primarily about science) and for a number of science fiction novels like "The Space Guardian."

He was born in a Smålandian village and under the early teens a farmer, but science, with its celebrities such as Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein made such an impression on him, as to motivate him to accomplish college studies by letter correspondence.

In the early 1960's he began his studies in Uppsala University, initially in mathematics, and thereafter theoretical physics, aesthetics, history of ideas and astronomy.

He was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1993.

September 19: Jean-Baptiste Delambre

Jean Baptiste Joseph, chevalier Delambre

September 19, 1749 - August 19, 1822

Jean-Baptiste Delambre was a French mathematician and astronomer. He was also director of the Paris Observatory, and author of well-known books on the history of astronomy from ancient times to the 18th century.

After a childhood fever, he suffered from very sensitive eyes, and believed that he would soon go blind. For fear of losing his ability to read, he devoured any book available to him and practised his ability to memorise. He thus immersed himself in Greek and Latin literature, acquired the ability to recall verbatim entire pages of books he may have read weeks beforehand, became fluent in Italian, English and German and even published Règles et méthodes faciles pour apprendre la langue anglaise (Easy rules and methods for learning English). In 1788, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

In 1801, First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte took the presidency of the Academy of Sciences and appointed Delambre its Permanent Secretary for the Mathematical Sciences, a post he held until his death.

After Méchain's death in 1804, he was appointed director of the Paris Observatory. He was also professor of Astronomy at the Collège de France. The same year he married Elisabeth-Aglaée Leblanc de Pommard, a widow with whom he had lived already for a long time. Her son, Achille-César-Charles de Pommard (1781-1807) assisted Delambre on several occasions in his astronomical and geodetical surveys, notably the measuring of the baselines for the meridian survey, and the latitude definition for Paris in December 1799 which was presented to the Conference of Savants.

Delambre was one of the first astronomers to derive astronomical equations from analytical formulas, was the author of Delambre's Analogies and, after the age of 70, also the author of works on the history of astronomy like the Histoire de l'astronomie.

He was a knight (chevalier) of the Order of Saint Michael and of the Légion d'honneur.

The crater Delambre on the Moon is named in his honor.

September 15: Jean-Sylvain Bailly

Jean-Sylvain Bailly

September 15, 1736 – November 12, 1793

Jean-Sylvain Bailly was a French astronomer and orator, one of the leaders of the early part of the French Revolution. He was ultimately guillotined during the Reign of Terror.

Born in Paris, he was originally intended for the profession of a painter, but preferred writing tragedies, until attracted to science by the influence of Nicolas de Lacaille. He calculated an orbit for Halley's Comet when it appeared in 1759, reduced Lacaille's observations of 515 zodiacal stars, and was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1763. His Essai sur la theorie des satellites de Jupiter (Essay on the theory of the satellites of Jupiter, 1766), an expansion of a memoir presented to the Academy in 1763, showed much original power; and it was followed up in 1771 by a noteworthy dissertation Sur les inegalites de la lumiere des satellites de Jupiter (On the inequalities of light of the satellites of Jupiter). In 1778, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Meantime, he had gained a high literary reputation by his Éloges of King Charles V of France, Lacaille, Molière, Pierre Corneille and Gottfried Leibniz, which were issued in collected form in 1770 and 1790; he was admitted to the Académie française on 26 February 1784, and to the Académie des Inscriptions in 1785, when Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's simultaneous membership of all three Academies was renewed in him.

From then on, he devoted himself to the history of science, publishing successively: Histoire de l'astronomie ancienne (A history of ancient astronomy, 1775); Histoire de l'astronomie moderne (A history of modern astronomy, 3 vols., 1779-1782); Lettres sur l'origine des sciences (Letters on the origin of the sciences, 1777); Lettres sur l' Atlantide de Platon (Letters on Plato's Atlantide , 1779); and Traite de l'astronomie indienne et orientale (A treatise on Indian and Oriental astronomy, 1787). The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica remarks that "Their erudition was… marred by speculative extravagances."

The lunar crater Bailly is named in his honor.

August 31: George Sarton

George Alfred Leon Sarton

August 31, 1884 - March 22, 1956

George Sarton is considered by some to be the "father" of the history of science, having established the history of science as a discipline in its own right. His Introduction to the History of Science is a mammoth three-volume, 4,236-page work which reviews and catalogs the scientific and cultural contributions of every civilization from antiquity through the fourteenth century. He was the author of 15 other books and over 300 articles on this subject.

Sarton was born in Ghent on August 31, 1884: he graduated from the university in 1906 and two years later won a gold medal for one of his papers on chemistry. He received his PhD in mathematics at the University of Ghent in 1911. He married Mabel Eleanor Elwes, an English artist, in 1911 and their daughter Eleanore Marie (usually: May) was born the following year. Though he emigrated to England after World War I broke out, he came to the United States in 1915, where he would live for the rest of his life. He worked for the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace and lectured at Harvard, 1916-18. He became a lecturer at Harvard University in 1920 and a professor of the history of science from 1940-1951. He was also a research associate of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1919-1948.

Sarton intended to complete an exhaustive nine volume history of science — which, during the preparation of the second volume, induced him to learn Arabic and travel around the Middle East inspecting original manuscripts of Islamic scientists — but at the time of his death only the first three volumes had been completed. (I. From Homer to Omar Khayyam. — II. From Rabbi Ben Ezra to Roger Bacon, pt. 1-2. — III. Science and learning in the fourteenth -century, pt. 1-2. 1927-48.) The project was inspired by his study of Leonardo da Vinci but the period of Leonardo's life was not reached before the death of Sarton.

After his death a representative selection of his papers was edited by Dorothy Stimson and published by Harvard University Press in 1962.

In honor of Sarton's achievements, the History of Science Society created the award known as the George Sarton Medal. It is the most prestigious award of the History of Science Society. It has been awarded annually since 1955 to an outstanding historian of science selected from the international scholarly community. The medal honors a scholar for lifetime scholarly achievement. Sarton was the founder of this society and of the serial publications Isis and Osiris which it publishes.

The Lunar crater Sarton is named in his honor.

April 1: Carl Charlier

Carl Vilhelm Ludwig Charlier

April 1, 1862 – November 5, 1934

Carl Charlier was a Swedish astronomer. He received his Ph.D. from Uppsala University in 1887, later worked there and at the Stockholm Observatory and was Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Observatory at Lund University from 1897.

After working in celestial mechanics, the calibration of photographic photometry, and the theory of lenses, he turned to statistics. He made contributions to pure statistics, especially the theory of errors, and made extensive statistical studies of the distribution and motions of stars in the solar neighborhood. 

Related to his work on galactic structure, he also developed a cosmological theory based on the work of Johann Heinrich Lambert. In the resulting Lambert-Charlier Hierarchical Cosmology, increasingly large areas of space contain decreasing densities of matter, the principle being introduced to avoid the observational inconsistency that would otherwise emerge from Olbers Paradox.

In his later years he became interested in the history of astronomy and translated Newton’s Principia into Swedish.

He received the James Craig Watson Medal in 1924 and the Bruce Medal in 1933. The Lunar crater Charlier, asteroid 8677 Charlier and a crater on Mars are named in his honor.

February 3: Jean-Baptiste Biot

Jean-Baptiste Biot

April 21, 1774 – February 3, 1862

Jean-Baptiste Biot was a French physicist, astronomer and mathematician. In 1800 he became professor of physics at the Collège de France, through the influence of Pierre-Simon Laplace, from whom he had sought and obtained the favor of reading the proof sheets of the Mécanique céleste. Three years later, at an unusually early age, he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences.

In the early 1800s, he studied the polarisation of light passing through chemical solutions, as well as the relationship between electrical current and magnetism. The Biot-Savart law, which describes the magnetic field generated by a steady current, is named after him and Félix Savart. Biot was the first to discover the unique optical properties of mica, and therefore the mica-based mineral biotite was named after him.

In 1804 Biot and Joseph Gay-Lussac made a hot-air balloon ascent to a height of five kilometres in an early investigation of the Earth's atmosphere. It was the first balloon ascent undertaken for scientific purposes.

His researches extended to almost every branch of physical science, but his most important work was of an optical character. He was especially interested in questions relating to the polarization of light, and his observations in this field, which gained him the Rumford medal of the Royal Society in 1840, laid the foundations of the polarimetric analysis of sugar.

Late in Biot's life, Pasteur demonstrated to him the opposite optical rotations (equal angle, but opposite direction) of polarized light passing through aqueous solutions of mirror-image crystals.

Biot was an extremely prolific writer, and besides a great number of scientific memoirs, biographies, etc., his published works include: Analyse de la mécanique céleste de M. Laplace (1801); Recueil d'observations géodésiques, astronomiques et physiques exécutées en Espagne et Écosse, with Arago (1821); Traité élémentaire d'astronomie physique (1805).

The Lunar crater Biot is named in his honor.

February 2: Ernst Zinner

Ernst Zinner

February 2, 1886 – August 30, 1970

Ernst Zinner was a German astronomer and noted historian of astronomy. After studies in Munich and Jena he obtained his PhD in 1907 at the University of Jena, followed by stays at the University of Lund, the University of Paris, and the Königstuhl Observatory in Heidelberg. 

On October 23, 1913 he rediscovered the Comet Giacobini-Zinner, which had been previously discovered by Michel Giacobini in 1900. His main work during this time was on variable stars. 

Dr. Ernst Zinner, director of the Remais-Sternwarte in Bamberg (Germany) 1926-1953 and distinguished historian of Renaissance astronomy, is well known to historians of scientific instruments through his manifold publications on instruments, amongst which his Deutsche und niederländische astronomische Instrumente des 11 – 18 Jahrhunderts (Munich: Beck, 1956), is certainly the most widely known.

Zinner was an untiring traveller, always interested to visit instrument collections or to see sundials on public buildings all over Europe before and after the Second World War. He painstakingly noted what he saw and which pictures he took, thereby accumulating an enormous reference collection on instruments.

His main astronomical work centered on stellar astronomy. His main speciality and interest, however, was Rennaissance Astronomy and the history of astronomical instruments, an area in which he started working in 1925. His obituaries quote a total of 9,000 printed pages on this subject, with the most significant ones focusing on biographies and cataloguing early astronomical works and instruments.

The Lunar crater Zinner is named in his honor.

January 26: Leo Goldberg

Leo Goldberg

January 26, 1913 – November 1, 1987

Leo Goldberg was one of the most distinguished leaders of the astronomical community in this century. He achieved outstanding success in the application of atomic physics to astrophysical problems, and is best known for pioneering efforts in the study of the sun from space. He is also known for his contributions to our understanding of gaseous nebulae, and to solar and stellar physics.  

Goldberg was director of three important observatories: University of Michigan (1946-60), Harvard (1960-71), where he was responsible for recruiting a number of outstanding young astronomers and nurturing a number of new research programs, and Kitt Peak National Observatory (1971-77), where he oversaw the commissioning and initial instrumentation of the Mayall and Blanco 4-meter telescopes. 

He played an important role in founding the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Kitt Peak National Observatory, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. He contributed real leadership as president of the American Astronomical Society (1964-66) and the International Astronomical Union (1971-76). From 1967-70, he served as Chair of NASA’s Astronomy Missions Board, and helped develop a strategic vision that led to a suite of ground-breaking missions that revolutionized solar physics and astrophysics during the ensuing decades. NOAO named their five-year fellowship in memory and honor of Leo Goldberg.

January 21: John Couch Adams

John Couch Adams 

June 5, 1819 – January 21, 1892

John Couch Adams was a British mathematician and astronomer. His most famous achievement was predicting the existence and position of Neptune, using only mathematics. The calculations were made to explain discrepancies with Uranus's orbit and the laws of Kepler and Newton. At the same time, but unknown to each other, the same calculations were made by Urbain Le Verrier. Le Verrier would assist Galle in locating the planet on September 23, 1846, which was found within 1° of its predicted location, a point in Aquarius. There was, and to some extent still is, some controversy over the apportionment of credit for the discovery.

Although he was not an active lunar observer, he was (as Wilkins and Moore point out) an outstanding mathematician and greatly improved the "lunar theory" (i.e., our understanding of the Moon's orbit).

The Lunar crater Adams is jointly named after him, Walter Sydney Adams and Charles Hitchcock Adams. Neptune's outermost known ring and the asteroid 1996 Adams are also named after him. The Adams Prize, presented by the University of Cambridge, commemorates his prediction of the position of Neptune. His personal library is now in the care of Cambridge University Library.

Janaury 20: Agnes Mary Clerke

Agnes Mary Clerke

February 10, 1842 – January 20, 1907

Agnes Mary Clerke was an astronomer and writer, mainly in the field of astronomy. She was interested in astronomy from an early age, and had begun to write about it before the age of 15. Her first important article, Copernicus in Italy, was published in the Edinburgh Review in October 1877. She achieved a world-wide reputation in 1885, on the appearance of her exhaustive treatise, A Popular History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century. Clerke was not a practical astronomer, instead collating, interpreting and summarising the results of astronomical research. In 1888 she spent three months at the Cape Observatory as the guest of the director, Sir David Gill, and his wife, and there became sufficiently familiar with spectroscopic work to be enabled to write about this newer branch of the science with increased clearness and confidence.

As a member of the British Astronomical Association she attended its meetings regularly, as well as those of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1903, with Lady Huggins, she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society, a rank previously held only by two other women, Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville.

Her sister, Ellen Mary Clerke (1840–1906), also wrote about astronomy. The Lunar crater Clerke is named in her honor.

January 19: Johann Elert Bode

Johann Elert Bode 

January 19, 1747 – November 23, 1826 

Johann Elert Bode was a German astronomer known for his reformulation and popularization of the Titius-Bode law. Bode determined the orbit of Uranus and suggested the planet's name. Bode was the director of the Berlin Observatory, where he published the Uranographia in 1801, a celestial atlas that aimed both at scientific accuracy in showing the positions of stars and other astronomical objects, as well as the artistic interpretation of the stellar constellation figures. The Uranographia marks the climax of an epoch of artistic representation of the constellations. Later atlases showed fewer and fewer elaborate figures until they were no longer printed on such tables. 

Bode also published an astronomical yearbook, another small star atlas, intended for astronomical amateurs (Vorstellung der Gestirne), and an introductory book on the constellations and their tales, which was reprinted more than ten times. 

He is credited with the discovery of Bode's Galaxy (M81). Comet Bode (C/1779 A1) and the Lunar crater Bode are named in his honor.

January 18: Warren De la Rue

Warren De la Rue 

January 18, 1815 – April 19, 1889

Warren De la Rue was a British astronomer and chemist, most famous for his pioneering work in the application of the art of photography to astronomical research.

In 1851 his attention was drawn to a daguerreotype of the Moon by G. P. Bond, shown at the great exhibition of that year. Excited to emulation and employing the more rapid wet-collodion process, he succeeded before long in obtaining exquisitely defined lunar pictures, which remained unsurpassed until the appearance of the Lewis Morris Rutherfurd photographs in 1865.

He was twice president of the Chemical Society, and also of the Royal Astronomical Society (1864–1866). In 1862 he received the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1864 a Royal medal from the Royal Society, for his observations on the total eclipse of the sun in 1860, and for his improvements in astronomical photography.

The crater De La Rue on the Moon is named in his honor.

January 17: Clyde Tombaugh

Clyde William Tombaugh 

February 4, 1906 – January 17, 1997

Clyde Tombaugh was an American astronomer. Tombaugh is best known for discovering the dwarf planet Pluto in 1930, but also discovered many asteroids.

While a young researcher working for the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, Tombaugh was given the job to perform a systematic search for a trans-Neptunian planet (also called Planet X), which had been predicted by Percival Lowell and William Pickering.

Tombaugh used the observatory's 13-inch astrograph to take photographs of the same section of sky several nights apart. He then used a blink comparator to compare the different images. When he shifted between the two images, a moving object, such as a planet, would appear to jump from one position to another, while the more distant objects such as stars would appear stationary. Tombaugh noticed such a moving object in his search, and subsequent observations showed it to be the object we call Pluto. The discovery was made on Tuesday, February 18, 1930, using images taken in January of the same year.

Tombaugh discovered a total of 14 asteroids, during his search for Pluto and years of follow-up searches looking for another candidate for the postulated Planet X. Tombaugh is also credited with the discovery of comet C/1931 AN, though its orbit is currently unknown. The asteroid 1604 Tombaugh, discovered in 1931, is named after him.

January 14: Edmond Halley

Edmond Halley 

November 8, 1656 - January 14, 1742 

Edmond Halley was a British astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteoroligist and physicist. 

One problem that attracted his attention was the proof of Kepler's laws of planetary motion. In August 1684 he went to Cambridge to discuss this with Isaac Newton, only to find that Newton had solved the problem but published nothing. Halley convinced him to write the Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (1687), which was published at Halley's expense.

Edmond Halley is perhaps best known for Halley's Comet, which was the first comet to be recognized as periodic. Perceiving that the observed characteristics of a comet of 1682 were nearly the same as those of two comets which had appeared in 1531 (observed by Petrus Apianus) and 1607 (observed by Johannes Kepler), Halley concluded that all three comets were in fact the same object returning every 76 years. After a rough estimate of the perturbations the comet would sustain from the attraction of the planets, he predicted its return for 1758. Halley's prediction of the comet's return proved to be correct. Halley himself did not live to see the comet's return, having died in 1742.

The Moon crater Halley and a crater on Mars are named in his honor.

January 13: Olin Chaddock Wilson

Mt. Wilson Observatory, 100-inch Hooker Telescope

Olin Chaddock Wilson (January 13, 1909 – July 13, 1994) was an American astronomer best known for his work as a stellar spectroscopist. He studied astronomy and physics at the University of California, Berkeley and wrote his first scientific paper in 1932 on the subject of the speed of light. He received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1934.

Wilson was a staff member of Mount Wilson Observatory for most of his research career where he studied stellar chromospheres. He was the first scientist to discover activity cycles, similar to the solar 11-year sunspot cycle, in other stars. 

In collaboration with Vainu Bappu he also showed that there was a correlation between the width of the Ca II lines in stellar spectra and the star's luminosity, the Wilson-Bappu Effect. The widths and shapes of the spectral lines told them about stellar rotation and atmospheric turbulence. The presence of sharp non-stellar absorption lines in the spectra told them about the amounts, temperatures, and random motions in the foreground interstellar matter. The presence of emission lines told them about chromospheric matter and excited matter around the stars.

January 12: Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov

Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov

January 12, 1907 – January 14, 1966

Korolyov (also spelled Korolev) was the head Soviet rocket engineer and designer during the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. He invented the R-7 rocket.

Korolyov's greatest strengths proved to be in design integration, organization and strategic planning. He was appointed to lead the Soviet space program and oversaw the early successes of the Sputnik and Vostok projects. By the time he died unexpectedly in 1966, his plans to compete with the United States to be the first nation to land a man on the Moon had begun to be implemented.

Before his death he was often referred to only as "Chief Designer", because his name and his pivotal role in the Soviet space program had been held to be a state secret by the Politburo. Only many years later he was publicly acknowledged as the lead man behind Soviet success in space.

The Lunar basin Korolev is named in his honor.

January 11: William Tyler Olcott

William Tyler Olcott

January 11, 1873 – July 6, 1936

William Tyler Olcott was an American lawyer and amateur astronomer. In 1909, after attending a lecture by Edward Pickering, he developed an interest in observing variable stars. In 1911, he and professor Pickering founded the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). Olcott also published several books to popularize the field of amateur astronomy. The Moon crater Olcott is named in his honor.

January 10: Simon Marius

Simon Marius

January 10, 1573 – December 26, 1624

Simon Marius was a German astronomer. In 1614 Marius published his work Mundus Iovialis describing the planet Jupiter and its moons. Here he claimed to have discovered the planet's four major moons some days before Galileo. This led to a dispute with Galileo, who showed that Marius provided only one observation as early as Galileo's, and it matched Galileo's diagram for the same date, as published in 1610. 

It is considered possible that Marius discovered the moons independently, but at least some days later than Galileo; if so, he is the only person known to have observed the moons in the period before Galileo published his observations. Regardless of priority, the mythological names by which these satellites are known today (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) are those given them by Marius. The Moon crater Marius is named in his honor.

Simon Marius also observed the Andromeda "nebula", which had in fact already been known to Arab astronomers of the Middle Ages.

January 9: Caroline Herschel

Caroline Lucretia Herschel

March 16, 1750 – January 9, 1848

Caroline Lucretia Herschel was a German-born British astronomer. She is the sister of astronomer Sir William Herschel with whom she worked throughout both of their careers. Her most significant contribution to astronomy was the discovery of several comets and in particular the periodic comet 35P/Herschel-Rigollet, which bears her name. The Moon crater C. Herschel is named in her honor.