Category: Astrometry

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

Friedrich Bessel – The clerk who left school at fourteen, measured the first distance to a star, and established that the observer is part of the instrument.
Tycho Brahe – Danish astronomer (1546–1601) whose geo-heliocentric system kept the Earth central while agreeing with the sky exactly – the Concordant Orrery's trick, three centuries early.
Celestial navigation – One sight does not say where you are. It says you are somewhere on a circle three thousand miles across, and the craft is everything after that.
John Flamsteed – First Astronomer Royal. Forty-three years on a star catalogue, a refusal to print it unfinished, and a bonfire of the three hundred copies printed for him.
Edmond Halley – He paid for the Principia, invented the isoline map, and is remembered for a comet he did not discover, under a name given it after he died.
Peter van de Kamp – Announced the first planet outside the solar system in 1963. The wobble was his telescope, and it changed on the dates the lens was cleaned.
The Nautical Almanac – Published every year since 1767, and the reason longitude starts at Greenwich. Every figure in it was computed twice, by two men forbidden to confer.
Stellar parallax – The annual shift demanded as proof of the Earth's motion in 1543, not found for 295 years, and there the whole time.