swap_horiz Charles Messier Alternatives

1

Philip James Edwin Peebles

Philip James Edwin Peebles is a Canadian-American cosmologist at Princeton, awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for...

Modern Cosmology Nobel Cmb

9.8 Brilliant

2

S. Chandrasekhar

S. Chandrasekhar was an Indian American astrophysicist whose 1930 Chandrasekhar limit explained the maximum mass of stab...

Twentieth Century Black Holes Stellar Nobel

9.7 Brilliant

3

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a Northern Irish astrophysicist who discovered the first radio pulsars as a Cambridge...

Modern Radio Women Pulsars

9.7 Brilliant

4

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is the Northern Irish scientist whose 1967 pulsar discovery opened a major field in radio astr...

Modern Radio Women Pulsars

9.7 Brilliant

5

Claudius Ptolemy

Claudius Ptolemy was a Greco-Roman astronomer in Alexandria whose Almagest, written about 150 CE, formalized the geocent...

Ancient Geocentric Alexandria Catalogs

9.6 Brilliant

6

Bohdan Paczynski

Bohdan Paczynski was a Polish astronomer at Princeton University notable for his pioneering work on gravitational microl...

Polish Twentieth Century Gamma Rays Microlensing

9.6 Brilliant

7

Jan Oort

Jan Oort was a Dutch astronomer who established the Milky Way's rotation in the 1920s and proposed the distant comet res...

Dutch Twentieth Century Galactic Oort Cloud

9.4 Excellent

8

William Herschel

William Herschel was a German-born British astronomer who discovered Uranus in 1781 and built large reflecting telescope...

Eighteenth Century Nebulae Uranus Telescopes

9.3 Excellent

9

John Herschel

John Herschel was a British astronomer who surveyed southern skies from South Africa in the 1830s and cataloged nebulae...

Southern Nineteenth Century Catalogs Nebulae

8.8 Great

10

Ulugh Beg

Ulugh Beg was a Timurid ruler and astronomer who built the Samarkand observatory and compiled a major star catalog in th...

Medieval Observatory Samarkand Catalogs

8.6 Great

11

Al-Sufi

Al-Sufi was a Persian astronomer whose 964 Book of Fixed Stars described constellations and gave one of the earliest rec...

Medieval Islamic Stars Catalogs

8.2 Great

12

Caroline Herschel

Caroline Herschel was a German-born British astronomer who discovered several comets and became a paid royal astronomer...

Women Comets Catalogs Eighteenth Century

8.2 Great

13

Edward Charles Pickering

Edward Charles Pickering was an American astronomer who directed Harvard College Observatory from 1877 and expanded phot...

Harvard Twentieth Century Catalogs Photometry

8.2 Great

14

Johannes Hevelius

Johannes Hevelius was a Polish astronomer in Gdansk who published detailed lunar maps in 1647 and described several cons...

Polish Lunar Early Modern Catalogs

8.0 Great

15

Williamina Fleming

Williamina Fleming was a Scottish-American astronomer at Harvard who classified thousands of stars and discovered the Ho...

Twentieth Century Women Spectroscopy Catalogs

8.0 Great

16

John Flamsteed

John Flamsteed was England's first Astronomer Royal, appointed in 1675, and produced the Historia Coelestis Britannica s...

British Observational Early Modern Catalogs

7.9 Good

17

Carolyn Shoemaker

Carolyn Shoemaker was an American astronomer who co-discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1993 and became a leading disco...

Planetary Twentieth Century Women Comets

7.9 Good

18

Maria Mitchell

Maria Mitchell was an American astronomer who discovered a comet in 1847 and became the first female professor at Vassar...

American Women Comets Nineteenth Century

7.7 Good

19

Bart Bok

Bart Bok was a Dutch-American astronomer known for work on the Milky Way and Bok globules, small dark nebulae linked to...

Dutch Twentieth Century Milky Way Nebulae

7.7 Good

20

David Levy

David Levy is a Canadian amateur astronomer and science writer who co-discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1993 with the...

Canadian Observational Twentieth Century Comets

7.6 Good