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Ptolemy
Ptolmey discovered the geocentric model that was excepted for 1,500 years. We know very little of Ptolemy's life. He made astronomical observations from Alexandria in Egypt during the years AD 127-41. We do know that Ptolemy used observations made by the "Theon the mathematician", this was most certainly Theon of Smyrn who was his teacher. -
Feb 19, 1473
Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Polish astronomer who lived in Poland. He put forth the theory that the Sun is at rest near the center of the Universe, and that the Earth, spinning on its axis once daily, revolves annually around the Sun. This is called the heliocentric, or Sun-centered, system. -
Dec 14, 1546
Brahe
Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe made the most accurate celestial observations of his time and challenged the prevailing belief in how the universe was organized. Born in Denmark in 1546, Brahe's parents were memebers of nobility. In 1577, he observed a comet. Current theory taught that both were disturbances in the atmosphere. -
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Kepler
Johannes Kepler was born about 1 PM on December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Württemberg, in the Holy Roman Empire of German Nationality.Kepler was forced to leave his teaching post at Graz due to the counter Reformation because he was Lutheran and moved to Prague to work with the renowned Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. Using the precise data that Tycho had collected, Kepler discovered that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse. -
Gallileo
Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa in 1564, a musician and scholar. In 1581 he entered the University of Pisa to study medicine, but soon was sidetracked by mathematics. Considered the father of modern science, Galileo Galilei made major contributions to the fields of physics, astronomy, cosmology, mathematics and philosophy. He invented an improved telescope that let him observe and describe the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus, sunspots and the rugged lunar surface. -
The first reflecting telescope.
Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 and was elected a minor fellow. He constructed the first reflecting telescope in 1668, and the following year he received his Master of Arts degree and took over as Cambridge’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. -
Spiral nebulae are discovered.
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The first permanent solar telescope
On March 14, 1879, Albert Einstein is born, the son of a Jewish electrical engineer in Ulm, Germany. In 1919, astronomers studying a solar eclipse verified predictions Einstein made in the general theory of relativity, and he became an overnight. During the next decade, Einstein made continued contributions to quantum theory and began work on a unified field theory, which he hoped would encompass quantum mechanics and his own relativity theory a grand explanation of the workings of the universe. -
