Share ThisA Timeline of Astronomy
Part of the Astronomy For Dummies Cheat Sheet
The study of astronomy is vast and encompasses a huge amount of information. This chart represents important events, like discoveries and inventions that have impacted astronomy through the ages:
| 2000 B.C. According to legend, two Chinese astronomers are executed for not predicting an eclipse and for being drunk as it happened. |
| 129 B.C. Hipparchos completes the first catalog of the stars. |
| A.D. 150 Ptolemy publishes his theory of the Earth-centered universe. |
| 970 al-Sufi prepares catalog of over 1,000 stars. |
| 1420 Ulugh-Beg, prince of Turkestan, builds a great observatory and prepares tables of planet and star data. |
| 1543 While on his deathbed, Copernicus publishes his theory that planets orbit around the sun. |
| 1609 Galileo discovers craters on Earth’s moon, the moons of Jupiter, the turning of the sun, and the presence of innumerable stars in the Milky Way with a telescope that he built. |
| 1666 Isaac Newton begins his work on the theory of universal gravitation. |
| 1671 Newton demonstrates his invention, the reflecting telescope. |
| 1705 Edmond Halley predicts that a great comet will return in 1758. |
| 1758 On Christmas, farmer/amateur astronomer Johann Palitzch discovers the return of Halley’s Comet. |
| 1781 William Herschel discovers Uranus. |
| 1791 Benjamin Banneker, the first African-American scientist, begins star observations needed for the geographical survey to establish the future capital city of the United States, Washington, D.C. |
| 1833 Abraham Lincoln and thousands of others see an enormous meteor shower over North America on November 12th and 13th. |
| 1842 Christian Doppler discovers the principle by which sound or light shifts in frequency and wavelength due to the motion of its source with respect to the observer. |
| 1846 Johann Galle is the first person to spot Neptune. |
| 1910 Earth passes through the tail of Halley’s Comet. |
| 1916 Albert Einstein proposes the General Theory of Relativity, which explains the nature of gravity and the bending of light as it passes the sun, predicts the existence of black holes, and details the twisting of time and space in the vicinity of a massive, spinning object. |
| 1923 Edwin Hubble proves that other galaxies lie beyond the Milky Way. |
| 1926 The first launch of a liquid-fuel rocket, developed by Robert Goddard. |
| 1930 Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto. |
| 1931 Karl Jansky discovers radio waves from space. |
| 1939 Hans Bethe explains the energy source of the sun and other stars. |
| 1940 Grote Reber reports the first radio telescope survey of the sky. |
