Lab #1 Ana Gavric 02/02/2017 My top six astronomers of all time would have to be Galileo, Hipparchus, Edwin Hubble, Johannes Kepler, William Herschel, Nicolaus Copernicus. It was a difficult decision because there are many very wonderful astronomers, but I believe that these six were pivotal to the contribution and development of modern day astronomy. Copernicus was the first to come up with the model that the sun is in the center of the universe and because of this, Galileo and Brahe were eventually able to prove that this was indeed a fact and base their future research off of his initial findings. William Herschel was a brilliant man in his own right. He constructed his own telescope in the late 1700’s and while using it, discovered Uranus, its moons, and Saturn’s moons. He …show more content…
Johannes Kepler was the man that came up with the laws of planetary motion, which in turn provided one of the foundations for Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Edwin Hubble was an American astronomer that played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology and is regarded as one of the most important astronomers of all time. Hipparchus was known as the greatest astronomer of ancient times for several reasons. He was the first whose quantitative and accurate models for the motion of the sun and moon survive, he may have been the first to develop a reliable method to predict solar eclipses, the discovery and measurement of Earth's precession, the compilation of the first comprehensive star catalog of the western world, and possibly the invention of the astrolabe, also of the armillary sphere, which he used during the creation of much of the star catalogue. After all these other aforementioned astronomers, the man that would have to be at the very top of my list of most important astronomers of all time would have to be Galileo. So what makes him so important than he would be the leader of the pack