Astronomers and cosmologists

Introduction

Alhazen

Spherical and Parabolic Mirrors

Anaximander

The Origin of the Universe

Aristarchus of Samos

The Size of and Distance to the Sun

Walter Baade

Stellar Populations

Edward Emerson Barnard

Interstellar Matter

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Pulsars

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel

The Distance to 61 Cygni

Tycho Brahe

Precise Measurements in Astronomy

E. Margaret Burbidge

Nucleosynthesis

Annie Jump Cannon

Spectral Classification of Stars

George R. Carruthers

Far-Ultraviolet Astronomy from Space

Gian Domenico Cassini

The Scale of the Solar System

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

The Chandrasekhar Limit

Nicolaus Copernicus

The Heliocentric System

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

Verifying the General Theory of Relativity

The Mass-Luminosity Relation

Sandra Faber

Dark Matter

Hippolyte Fizeau

Measuring the Speed of Light

Léon Foucault

The Rotation of the Earth

Herbert Friedman

Rocket Astronomy

Galileo

Principles on the Mechanics of Motion

Galileo's Use of the Telescope

Margaret Geller

The Large-Scale Distribution of Galaxies

Alan H. Guth

The Inflationary Universe

George Ellery Hale

Magnetic Fields in the Sun

Edmond Halley

Solving the Mystery of Comets

Stephen Hawking

Evolution of the Universe

Black Holes

Sir John Herschel

Mapping the Stars

Sir William Herschel

Sidereal Astronomy

Ejnar Hertzsprung

The Measurement of Cosmic Distances

Antony Hewish

What Causes a Pulsar?

Sir Fred Hoyle

Steady State Cosmology

Nucleosynthesis of Elements

Edwin Powell Huhble

Hubble's Law of the Expanding Universe

Sir William Huggins

Spectrum Analysis of Stars

Christiaan Huygens

The Principle of Secondary Wave Fronts

Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn

Spectrum Analysis of Stars

Johannes Kepler

Kepler's Three Laws of Planetary Motion

Gerard Peter Kuiper

The Origin of the Solar System

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

The Period-Luminosity Law for Cepheid Variable Stars

Georges Lemaître

The Primeval Atom

Jane X. Luu

The Kuiper Belt

Antonia Maury

Classification of Stellar Spectra

Albert Abraham Michelson

The Michelson-Morley Experiment

Maria Mitchell

What the Stars Reveal

Wilhelm Others

Comets and a Paradox

Jan Hendrik Oort

The Structure of the Galaxy

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

The Composition of Stars

Ptolemy

Ptolemy's Epicycles: A Model for Planetary Motion

Vera C. Rubin

Dark Matter

Henry Norris Russell

The Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram

Carl Sagan

Exploration of the Planet Mars

Allan Rex Sandage

The Big Bang

Maarten Schmidt

Quasars

Harlow Shapley

Finding the Size of the Milky Way

Vesto Melvin Slipher

The Doppler Shift of the Andromeda Nebula

Fritz Zwicky

Neutron Stars and Dark Matter

Glossary

Index