Category: Astronomers

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

• George Biddell Airy – The Astronomer Royal whose 1871 aether experiment was rebranded 'Airy's failure' and conscripted, posthumously and without consent, as a flat-earth proof.
• Anaximander – The Milesian who first set the Earth adrift, unsupported at the centre of things – and left it, all the same, flat on top.
• 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.
• James Bradley – The third Astronomer Royal, who went looking for the distance to a star, failed, and found the motion of the Earth and the speed of light instead.
• 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.
• Nicolaus Copernicus – Renaissance astronomer (1473–1543) who set the Earth in motion around the Sun – the geocentric and flat traditions' founding antagonist – and published as he died.
• Eratosthenes – Greek polymath (c. 276–194 BC) who measured the Earth's circumference to within a few percent – the figure whole-radian geometry declines to address.
• 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.
• C. Fome – Exhibition-astronomer (b. 1738) who showed the paying public painted cards through his telescope: the original Counterfeit Graphic Inserts, or C.G.I.
• 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.
• Edwin Hubble – He proved the universe is bigger than our galaxy, got every distance seven times too short, and refused to the end to call it expanding.
• 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.
• Johannes Kepler – German astronomer (1571–1630) who found the planets move in ellipses, after first building a lovelier, wrong model of nested Platonic solids; a founder of modern optics.
• Henrietta Swan Leavitt – Employed at thirty cents an hour to measure star brightness on glass plates, she found the relation that tells us how far away everything is.
• Nevil Maskelyne – Fifth Astronomer Royal, remembered as the man who cheated John Harrison. He ran the trial in question, and it beat his own method by three to one.
• Dayton Miller – Eminent American physicist (1866–1941) who spent thirty years detecting an aether drift later reassigned, in full, to the temperature of his hut.
• Ptolemy – Alexandrian astronomer (c. 100–170 AD) whose Earth-centred cosmos held for 1,400 years – its central Earth, to his admirers' inconvenience, a sphere.

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