swap_horiz John Flamsteed Alternatives

1

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

2

Simon White

Simon White is a British astrophysicist known for numerical simulations of cosmic structure formation and for developing...

Modern Cosmology British Simulations

9.1 Excellent

3

Richard Ellis

Richard Ellis is a British astronomer at University College London notable for using gravitational lensing and deep fiel...

Modern British Galaxies Surveys

9.0 Excellent

4

Donald Lynden-Bell

Donald Lynden-Bell was a British theoretical astrophysicist who proposed in 1969 that quasars are powered by accretion o...

British Twentieth Century Black Holes Galactic

8.9 Great

5

David Jewitt

David Jewitt is a British-American astronomer who, with Jane Luu, discovered 1992 QB1, the first known Kuiper Belt objec...

Modern British Planetary Kuiper Belt

8.9 Great

6

Giovanni Domenico Cassini

Giovanni Domenico Cassini was an Italian-French astronomer who discovered Saturn's ring division in 1675 and four of its...

Observational Planetary Early Modern Saturn

8.8 Great

7

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

8

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

9

Ole Romer

Ole Romer was a Danish astronomer who in 1676 used eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io to show that light travels at finite sp...

Danish Jupiter Early Modern Light Speed

8.6 Great

10

James Bradley

James Bradley was an English astronomer who discovered stellar aberration in 1728, providing evidence for Earth's motion...

British Early Modern Astrometry Aberration

8.6 Great

11

Charles Messier

Charles Messier was a French astronomer whose 18th-century catalog listed nebulae and clusters to help comet hunters avo...

Comets Catalogs Eighteenth Century Nebulae

8.4 Great

12

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

13

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

14

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

15

Bernard Lovell

Bernard Lovell was a British radio astronomer who founded the Jodrell Bank Observatory and built its 76-meter radio tele...

Radio British Observatory Twentieth Century

8.2 Great

16

Nick Kaiser

Nick Kaiser is a British cosmologist known for work on weak gravitational lensing and the Kaiser effect in galaxy redshi...

Modern Cosmology British Lensing

8.2 Great

17

Martin Elvis

Martin Elvis is a British-born American astrophysicist at Harvard University highly noted for his extensive observationa...

Modern British X Ray Quasars

8.2 Great

18

Alexei Filippenko

Alexei Filippenko is an American astronomer known for supernova research and his role in teams that found the accelerati...

Modern American Observational Supernovae

8.1 Great

19

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

20

Jeremiah Horrocks

Jeremiah Horrocks was an English astronomer who predicted and observed the 1639 transit of Venus, the first recorded obs...

British Early Modern Transits Venus

7.5 Good