swap_horiz John Herschel 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

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

7

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was a German astronomer who measured the first reliable stellar parallax, for 61 Cygni, in 1838...

Parallax Nineteenth Century Stars Astrometry

8.9 Great

8

Urbain Le Verrier

Urbain Le Verrier was a French mathematician and astronomer whose 1846 calculations predicted Neptune's position from Ur...

French Celestial Mechanics Nineteenth Century Neptune

8.7 Great

9

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

10

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

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

Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve

Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve was a Baltic German astronomer who studied double stars and founded Pulkovo Observato...

Russian Nineteenth Century Astrometry Binary Stars

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

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

16

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

17

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

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

Johann Gottfried Galle

Johann Gottfried Galle was a German astronomer who observed Neptune on 23 September 1846 using Le Verrier's predicted po...

German Observational Nineteenth Century Neptune

7.6 Good