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322 BCE
Aristotle
Aristotle lived through 384-322 BCE. Aristotle came up with the theory of Earth being the center of the universe and everything surround the it. -
100
ptolemy
Ptolemy lived from 100-168 AD. He was an ancient astronomer, geographer, and mathematician who thought the Earth the center of the universe. -
1473
Copernicus
Copernicus lived from 1473 to 1543. He finished the first manuscript of his book, "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" in 1532. In it, Copernicus established the idea that the planets orbited the sun rather than the Earth. He laid out his model of the solar system and the path of the planets. -
1546
Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe lived from 1546-1601. He was a Alchemist, astrologer, astronomer, supporter of the geocentric Earth-centered theory of the Solar System. He made some of the most accurate observations of planetary positions which would eventually prove useful to his predecessors. -
1564
Galileo
Galileo lived from 1564 to 1642. Of all of his telescope discoveries, he is perhaps most known for his discovery of the four most massive moons of Jupiter, now known as the Galilean moons Ganymede, Europa and Callisto. When NASA sent a mission to Jupiter in the 1990s, it was called Galileo in honor of the famed astronomer. -
1570
Hans Lippershey
Hans Lippershey lived from 1570 to 1619. He was a Dutch eyeglass maker who many historians believe was the inventor of the first telescope and is also sometimes credited with the invention of the compound microscope. Lippershey was born in Wesel, Germany and settled in the Netherlands, opening a spectacles shop in Middleburg. -
1571
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler lived from, 1571-1630. Was a German astronomer who discovered three major laws of planetary motion, conventionally designated as follows (1) the planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus (2) the time necessary to traverse any arc of a planetary orbit is proportional to the area of the sector between the central body and that arc and (3) there is an exact relationship between the squares of the planets periodic times and the cubes of the radii of their orbits. -
The difference between refracting reflecting telescopes
The first refracting telescope was made in 1608. They offer amazingly crisp views of the Moon and planets and double stars.
The first Reflecting telescope was made in 1668. It was made by Isaac Newton and A mirror collects light from objects in space, forming the image. This smaller mirror reflects the light to an eyepiece lens, which enlarges, or magnifies, the image of the object. -
Giovanni Cassini
Giovanni Cassini lived from 1625-1712. Astronomer Giovanni Cassini is associated with a number of scientific discoveries and projects, including the first observations of Saturn's moons. However he also used the name Gian Domenico Cassini, and after he moved to France as an adult, he changed his name to the French version Jean-Dominique Cassini. -
Sir Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton lived from 1643-1724. Sir Isaac Newton contributed significantly to the field of science over his lifetime. He invented calculus and provided a clear understanding of optics. But his most significant work had to do with forces, and specifically with the development of a universal law of gravity. -
William Herschel
William Herschel lived from 1738-1822. Sir William Herschel was a German-born British astronomer and composer, who is widely credited as the founder of sidereal astronomy for observing the heavenly bodies. He found the planet Uranus and its two moons, and formulated a theory of stellar evolution. -
Percival Lowell
Percival Lowell lived from 1855-1916. Percival Lowell was an astronomer, author and mathematician who founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona. He is best known for fueling speculation that there was life on Mars, a vision that has had enormous impact on the development of Science Fiction. -
Ejnar Hertzsprung
Ejnar Hertzsprung Lived from 1873-1967. He was a danish astronomer who classified types of stars by relating their color to their absolute brightness an accomplishment of fundamental importance to modern astronomy. The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stellar types was named for him. In 1913 he established the luminosity scale of Cepheid variable stars, a tool for measurement of intergalactic distances. -
Albert Ignstein
Albert Ignstein lived from 1879-1955. Einstein's many scientific contributions include the equivalence of mass and energy how the maximum speed limit of light affects measurements of time and space , and a more accurate theory of gravity based on simple geometric concept. One reason Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics was to make the prize more prestigious. -
Edwin Hubble
Edwin Hubble lived from 1889-1953. In the 1920s, the small, diffuse patches in the sky were termed nebulae, and were thought to exist within the Milky Way. Hubble noticed a pulsating star known as a Cepheid variable inside each one. Cepheids are special because their pulsation allows for precise measurements of distance. Hubble calculated how far away each Cepheid lay and how far to each nebula and realized they were too distant to be inside of the Milky Way. -
Karl Jansky
Karl Jansky lived from 1905-1950. Radio astronomy is the study of the radio frequencies emitted from stars, galaxies and other celestial objects. Radio waves are produced naturally from lightning and astronomical objects, or are produced by man made communication techniques and broadcasting technology. Many radio telescopes are located around the globe and have helped discover new types of stars and galaxies that do not emit light and remain invisible to traditional telescopes. -
John Glenn
John Glenn was born on 1921-2016. On February 20, 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. Glenn’s Friendship 7 spacecraft circumnavigated the globe three times and returned to earth in four hours, fifty-five minutes, and 23 seconds. He was going about 17,500 miles per hour. -
Neil Armstrong
Neil Armstrong lived from 1930-2012. Neil Armstrong changed the world. He was an excellent engineer and an outstanding pilot. He got the assignment to land a completely novel rocket machine on the Earth’s Moon, because he was the perfect man for the job He could really fly he had excellent judgment about the capabilities of his ship; and above all, he had a remarkable ability to keep his wits about him in extraordinarily dangerous situations. -
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin was born in 1934. He was the first person to fly in space. His flight, on April 12, 1961, lasted 108 minutes as he circled the Earth for a little more than one orbit in the Soviet Union's Vostok spacecraft. Following the flight, Gagarin became a cultural hero in the Soviet Union. Even today, more than six decades after the historic flight, Gagarin is widely celebrated in Russian space museums, with numerous artifacts, busts and statues displayed in his honor. -
Sputnik
Sputnik was made in 1957. Sputnik's launch stunned the world and changed it, too. It heralded in dramatic fashion a new "space age," created an identity crisis in the United States, led to the creation of NASA and began a flurried race between the world's two superpowers to place a human on the moon. -
The Apollo Program
The Apollo Program lasted from 1963-1972. The Apollo, project conducted by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the 1960s and ’70s that landed the first humans on the Moon. In May 1961 John F. Kennedy committed America to landing astronauts on the Moon by 1970. The choice among competing techniques for achieving a Moon landing and return was not resolved until considerable further study. -
First Space shuttle flight
The first Space shuttle flight happened on 1981. Columbia was the first shuttle to reach space, in 1981. Columbia carried dozens of astronauts into space during the next two decades, reaching several milestones. Columbia also underwent upgrades as technology advanced. -
The Mars Pathfinder Expedition
The Mars Pathfinder Expedition was launched in 1996. It was designed as a technology demonstration of a new way to deliver an instrumented lander and the first-ever robotic rover to the surface of the red planet. -
Cassini Orbiter
Cassini Orbiter was launched on 1997. It began the first in-depth, up-close study of Saturn and its system of rings and moons in 2004. It became the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn, beginning a mission that yielded troves of new insights over more than a decade. The Saturn system proved to be rich ground for exploration and discoveries, and Cassini's science findings changed the course of future planetary exploration. -
Mapped other galaxies
The latest data release from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey includes observations revealing the internal structure and composition of nearly 5,000 nearby galaxies observed during the first three years of a program called Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory.
