Sir William Huggins

William Huggins built his own private observatory in 90 Upper Tulse Hill South London, where he and his wife became immersed in extensive observations of the spectral emission lines and absorption lines of different celestial objects. Huggins made a huge contribution in astronomy by identifying the spectrum of planetary nebulae on his analysis of the NGC 6543. He distinguished the differences of the nebulae and the galaxies by presenting that nebulae, like the Orion nebula, displayed pure emission spectra characteristics of gas while the galaxies, like the Andromeda galaxy had a spectra characteristic of stars. He achieved this observation with the help of his neighbor William Allen Miller, who is a chemist. In the field of photography, he was the first to adopt the method of dry plate photography in imaging astronomical bodies.

Sir William Huggins, a knight commander of the Order of Bath, Order of Merit and a Fellow of the Royal Society received various admirable awards such as the Royal medal in 1866, Rumford medal in 1880, Henry Draper medal in 1901 and the Copley medal in 1898. He also delivered a Bakerian lecture, a prize lecture in the Royal Society, in 1885. He served as the president of the Fellow of the Royal Society from 1900 to 1905. Two craters were named after him, one that is lunar and the other a Martian crater. The Asteroid 2635 Huggins was also named in his honor.

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Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer

His works mainly involved the Sun and it was in this study that he investigated sunspots and solar prominences discovering in 1868 with Pierre Janssen. It was in this investigation that he made his most important discovery. He was able to successfully identify the spectral line then to be an unknown element observed by Janssen in the year 1868 and proposed to name it helium, from the Greek word helios, meaning Sun. The discovery of the element Helium was supported and confirmed by William Ramsay in the year 1895, when he successfully isolated the gases in the atmosphere, one of which includes the element Helium.

In the year 1869, Lockyer established the science journal Nature to help facilitate the sharing and circulation of ideas between different scientific disciplines. He remained to be its editor until shortly before his passing in the year 1920. In 1894, Lockyer published his first classic of what?s been called the astro-archaeology, The Dawn of Astronomy and in 1906 he produced another work entitled Stonehenge and Other British Monuments Astronomically Considered. He aimed to establish the fact that many ancient monuments were astronomically aligned. He was passionate about his works, paying regular trips to Egypt, Greece, the Stranding Stones of Britain and led several solar eclipse expeditions, few of which includes the expedition to Sicily (year 1870) and India (years 1871 and 1898).

Lockyer retired in the year 1911 and established an observatory near his home called Hill Observatory, located in Salcombe Regis near Sidmouth, Devon. After his date, it was renamed the Normal Lockyer Observatory to honor and remember his contributions to the scientific study of astronomy.

Joseph Norman Lockyer died at the age of eighty four in his home in Salcombe Regis on August 16, 1920. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Peter and St. Mary.

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Archimedes

Archimedes also pioneered the concept called the Archimedes' Principle. This concept states that the force that buoys a submerged object in water is equal to the weight of the fluid that is displaced by the object. This principle is very helpful in developing technologies in various disciplines including shipbuilding, mining, physics, metallurgy, and chemistry.

The most explicit astronomic project of Archimedes, however, was his miniature planetarium–a highly-remarkable cosmological work of art that defined his view about the universe.

The planetarium presented a mechanical representation of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the planets as seen from the earth's skies. It should be noted that during his time, people believed that the earth was the center of the universe. In spite of his fascination in science, Archimedes himself submitted to the belief that the earth was indeed the center of heavenly bodies. Although this was the case, Archimedes' planetarium proved that it's helpful. The cosmic representation was able to plot the phases of the moon and the eclipses of the sun.

Archimedes' astronomic pursuits made him a favorite figure of ancient historians and writers. The very thought that the world was a part of a universe filled with heavenly bodies made people think about the existence of god. If the world was how Archimedes rendered it, then there must be a more powerful being that's capable of creating all those wonders.

Archimedes' mathematical works complemented his observations on astronomy. He dabbled in forming principles of geometry and discovered how to measure areas and volumes of spheres, cylinders, cones, cubes, and other geometric figures. This knowledge in one way or another shored up the development of astronomic devices like telescopes and lenses.

Little was known about Archimedes' personal life, but one thing's for sure; he dedicated his life to scholarly work and experiments that significantly changed the way people lived during his time.

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Medicine, however, was not enough to satisfy Draper’s hunger for intellectual and technical challenges. He continued to dabble in photography. This pursuit led him to several groundbreaking astronomical achievements during his time—achievements that were also initially ignored and ridiculed because of the lack of technological means.

Today, Henry Draper is honored as the first astronomer who took the first photo of an astronomical nebula, specifically the Great Nebula of Orion. In addition, the scientist is also acknowledged for an array of firsts including the first spectrum photo of a star, the first wide-angled photo of a comet’s tail, and first spectrum photo of a comet.

Draper did not stop with comets and stars. He also took excellent photographs of many other heavenly bodies including the sun, the moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and other bright, distant stars.

Needless to say, the scientist also toiled hard to develop camera technologies that would enhance the quality of astronomical photos. Credited under is name is the invention of the slit spectrograph, an instrument that could measure the properties of light. This invention opened new horizons in the field of photography and related areas like instrumental optics and telescope science.

As a dedicated scholar, Draper also wrote and published a number of books regarding his work on medicine and astronomy, among them his discourses on telescope design and photo spectrum analysis.

Draper died in 1882, but his works significantly changed the landscape of astronomy. Sure, there was a serious limitation in technologies during his time, but he worked hard to come up with evidences and become one of the seminal forces that inspired younger generations of astronomers to continue the quest in discovering heavenly bodies and cracking open the mysteries of the outer space.

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As a student, Kapteyn was interested in the physical sciences, and this made him earn degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Utrecht. After graduation, he jumped into full astronomic work through a job at the Leiden Observatory, and after this he went to the University of Groningen where he taught astronomy and theoretical mechanics for several decades until he retired in 1921. Today, the astronomy institute of the university now bears his name.

Like other acclaimed astronomers of his time, Kapteyn was lauded for recording the geographies of thousands of stars in space. One of his early works was the Cape Photographic Durchmusterung, a collaborative publication project he co-authored with David Gill that comprehensively listed the locations and magnitudes of nearly half a million stars in the Southern Hemisphere.

As far as the realm of cosmology is concerned, Kapteyn was strongly fascinated by the motions of stars; a concept that soon developed into the belief that the motions of the stars were not random but rather tied to an underlying system in the universe. The observations that Kapteyn became the initial evidences of Milky Way galaxy's rotation, and this ultimately resulted to the official recognition of galactic rotation by astronomers Bertil Lindblad and Jan Oort.

Kapteyn's most valuable contribution to the field was his life-work which aimed to come up with a grand theory on the arrangement and motion of the universe. In this study, the astronomer imagined the universe as kind of lens-shaped island called the Kapteyn's Universe model. In this model, the Milky Way galaxy was calculated to be 40,000 light years in size, wherein the sun is 2,000 light years to its center. These figures were incorrect in as much as Kapteyn was still not aware of the modern concept of interstellar absorption.

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Edward Charles Pickering

Pickering was born in Boston and educated at Harvard University's Lawrence Scientific School. His scientific endeavor included physics, and this made him a brilliant faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for ten years. It also was in this school where he was able to spearhead the construction of the first physics laboratory for instruction in America.

Pickering's interest in physics made it easy for him to specialize and flow into the field of astronomy. Soon he was appointed as chair of the Harvard College Observatory, a position that he held for more than forty years.

More than a dedicated scholar, Pickering was a leader who knew how to shake and move the discipline. He actively searched for ways to incorporate new technologies in photography with astronomy. He raised funds and built partnerships to realize major projects. He prepared a huge body of work for future scientists to use and make sense of. And most of all, he made sure that the public knew the significance of astronomy in the society.

One of Pickering's best astronomic legacies was his in-depth and huge body of photometric work on more than 45,000 stars in space. To achieve such feat, he was said to have manually crafted more than 1.4 million photometric devices.

Ensuring the continuous development of the discipline, Pickering invited a group of young female astronomers to work with him, a group that would be called Pickering's Harem. Its members consisted of the likes of Annie Cannon, Antonia Maury, Williamina Fleming, and Swan Leavitt. The discoveries that the group made were considered as the foundation of the modern theories on cosmological distances.

The last legacy of Pickering was the institution of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. In 1911, an organization that aimed to gather, evaluate, analyze, and share various star observations of astronomers, researchers, and scholars. The organization continues to exist until today, its current membership reaching to more than 2,000 worldwide.

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Hypatia

Hypatia was born in 370 AD in the center of learning that was Alexandria, Egypt. Her father was Theon, a famous mathematician-philosopher. Undoubtedly, her learned father trained and taught her, and together, they later collaborated in writing certain commentaries to prominent scientific works, such as Ptolemy's comprehensive astronomical writings. On her own, Hypatia herself authored similar commentaries on important writings, making them more accessible and understandable to many people. Examples of these were her commentaries on Apollonius's Conics and Diophantus's Arithmetica.

In time, Hypatia became the director of a Platonist school in Alexandria, and she became a famous teacher and educator. She was an authority on many subjects– primarily philosophy, Neoplatonic thought, mathematics and astronomy–and she is described as a very eloquent and charismatic lecturer.

She also made contributions to the mathematics, and was the first woman to do so. Other scholars asked her advice on many things, including, on some occasions, how to construct an astrolabe and a hydroscope. As a philosopher, she espoused Neoplatonic beliefs. Among these was the belief that ultimate reality was beyond the grasp of human intellect and words, and that it had to be mystically experienced. Nonetheless, her lectures had a very strong scientific emphasis, which made her stand out from earlier advocates of Neoplatonic thought.

Hypatia died in March 415 under gruesome circumstances. Some accounts say that she was murdered by fanatical Christian monks. Others say that she was attacked by an angry religious mob. Apparently, Hypatia was accused of being a witch or a proponent of pagan beliefs. At that time, women who demonstrated great learning and scientific knowhow were apt to be singled out as witches, because their progressive ideas were a threat to the prevailing religious and superstitious way of life.

Hypatia led a life full of fascinating intellectual accomplishments. For many people, she epitomizes the fearless and progressive attitude of a true scholar. She has inspired many modern writers to compose stories, novels and even movies about her.

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Aristotle

Based on his writings, Aristotle believed that the cosmos is round and finite. He believed that the cosmos is round in as much as it has a center, which is the earth. He also believed that the earth is round and smaller than the stars, and that the earth, unlike heavenly bodies, is at rest. Everything else moves around it. This observation, although incorrect, is logical: Aristotle thought that if the earth indeed moves, then the whole scheme of things would turn around. The stars, it would appear, are in their fixed places while the earth is in motion. The philosopher thought this couldn't be.

At least Aristotle was right for one thing: the earth is round. He asserted this belief by arguing that when a person goes to the north or to the south, he or she does not see the same stars in the evening or the same positions of the sky in the day.

Aristotle grew up in a period where people believed in the presence of four basic elements: earth, air, fire and water. The astronomer, however, theorized that a fifth element, which he called aether, serves as the main component of heavenly bodies. He described aether as something that couldn't be combined with other elements or reproduced. It is eternal, unchangeable, and has no sense of weight.
Aristotle also formed his own model of the solar system, wherein he included the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, the sun, and the moon. His concern in postulating this system was to make sense how heavenly bodies do not collide against one another.

Aristotle theorized that there are 22 counteracting spheres in the system, and these spheres set all the bodies in balance. Again, as we know it, this is wrong.

Aristotle did not have the devices to discover groundbreaking things about the universe, but he surely made significant contributions to astronomy simply by observing how nature behaved and always being inquisitive about the mysteries of the world.

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Hipparchus, a famous Greek mathematician and astronomer, was born in 190 BC in what is now Turkey. He may not be as famous today as Euclid, Pythagoras and other Greek luminaries, but during his time, he was greatly renowned. His mathematical achievements were considered exceptional by his contemporaries and many future generations. Simply put, he was a legend, and his face adorned coins that were in circulation for many decades in that period.

Hipparchus holds the distinction of developing trigonometry. He made what is arguably the earliest trigonometric table. This table provided an effective method to solve trigonometric problems. Hipparchus was also the first person to bring to Greece the idea of dividing a circle into 360 degrees.

In addition to trigonometry, Hipparchus also excelled in calendrical and astronomical studies. He made a star catalogue that continued to be used for a long time by future astronomers. It consisted of no less than 850 stars, with all their positions and movements accounted for. Hipparchus also made very accurate calculations of the solar year and the equinoxes. They were so accurate that the difference between his calculated year length and its present-day equivalent is less than 6.5 minutes.

Another valuable contribution of Hipparchus was his discovery of precession, which has to do with the axis of earth's rotation. Hipparchus was able to prove that the direction of this rotation changed slowly in time. This was significant in astronomical studies. It gave rise to two different kinds of year: the sidereal and the tropical.

Hipparchus also studied the moon and its motions. He was able to calculate with great accuracy the distance of the moon from the earth. He made use of empirical data and shrewd mathematical calculations to come up with his measurements.

Overall, Hipparchus managed to transform astronomy from being a largely theoretical study into a practical and predictive science. He demonstrated that careful observation and mathematical calculations, when combined, could predict the movements and positions of stars, the earth and the moon.

Clearly, Hipparchus was a mathematical and scientific genius. In his honor, a lunar crater has been named after him, the Crater Hipparchus. Another crater on the planet Mars also bears his name.

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