2 November

2000: On 2 November 2000, an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts became the first permanent residents of the International Space Station, at the start of their four-month mission.

After their Soyuz spacecraft linked up at 12:00 CET, William Shepherd, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko entered the station, turned on the lights and life support systems, and proceeded to set up a live television link with the Russian mission control to confirm that the move-in was going well.

1885: On 2 November 1885, Harlow Shapley was born.

Shapley was the American astronomer who became known as 'The Modern Copernicus' after he discovered the Sun's position in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

From 1914 to 1921, he was at Mt. Wilson Observatory, where he calibrated Henrietta S. Leavitt's 'period versus luminosity' relation for Cepheid variable stars and used it to determine the distances of globular clusters.

He boldly and correctly proclaimed that the globular clusters outline our galaxy, and that the galaxy is far larger than was generally believed, centred thousands of light years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.