18 July
1997: On 18 July 1997, Gene Shoemaker died.Shoemaker was an American planetary geologist. Shoemaker initiated and promoted the geology studies of American astronauts that made them able scientific observers and ...
27 FEB. 2004
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1846: On 19 July 1846, Edward Pickering was born.
Pickering was an American physicist and astronomer. He directed the Harvard College Observatory for forty-two years. He and his staff made visual photometric studies of 45 000 stars. With funds provided by Henry Draper’s widow, Anna Palmer Draper, he hired a number of women, including Williamina P. Fleming, Annie J. Cannon, Antonia Maury and Henrietta S. Leavitt, to produce the Henry Draper Catalogue. This contained objective prism spectra of hundreds of thousands of stars classified according to Cannon’s 'Harvard sequence'.
He established a station in Peru to take photographs of the southern sky and published the first all-sky photographic map.
Pickering and Hermann Carl Vogel independently discovered the first spectroscopic binary stars.
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17 July
1894: On 17 July 1894, Georges Lemaître was born.Lemaître was a Belgian astronomer and cosmologist, born in Charleroi, Belgium. He was also a civil engineer, army officer and ordained priest. ...
16 July
2000: On 16 July 2000, the first pair of the ESA Cluster flotilla blasted off aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.Cluster is a collection of four spacecraft flying ...
15 July
1943/1967: On 15 July 1943, Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born. In 1967, she celebrated her 24th birthday by discovering the first pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star that sends ...
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