Biographical Subjects
Johannes Kepler, 1610.
The history of astronomy is filled with brilliant, iconoclastic and colorful characters, any one of whom would make a fascinating subject in a biographical sketch. A straightforward biography done with little imagination can be extremely dry and lifeless, however. A novel approach—a dialogue between two historical figures or an imagined conversation with one of these individuals, for example—would be most welcome and certainly more rewarding to research and write.
The following individuals do not comprise an exhaustive list but should be good fodder for ideas:
Hans Bethe
Physicist who solved the mystery of how stars shine and later, how supernovae explode
Tycho Brahe
Aristocratic 16th century Danish astronomer and greatest naked-eye observer in history
Nicholaus Copernicus
Polish canon and medical doctor who formulated the first modern theory of a sun-centered cosmos—which was placed in the Index of Banned Books in 1616.
Giordano Bruno
Burned at the stake for heresy in 1600.
Subramanyan Chandrasekhar
Indian astronomery who theorized the existence of white dwarfs
Galileo Galilei
Italian astronomer/mathematican who first published observations using a telescope and was eventually tried before the Inquisition for teaching Copernicus' theory of a sun-centered cosmos
George Gamow
Astronomer and popularizer who predicted existence of evidence of the Big Bang
George Ellery Hale
Wealthy astronomer responsible for building the largest observatories of the 19th and 20th centuries
Edmond Halley
Friend of Isaac Newton who predicted return of comet that now bears his name
Ibn al-Haitham (Alhazen)
Living in the 10th and 11th centuries, he wrote about optics and concerns he had regarding Ptolemy's model of the heavens
Caroline and/or William Herschel
Brother and sister team who advanced our understanding of the galaxy and also discovered the planet Uranus.
Fred Hoyle
Brilliant astronomer and popularizer who was the chief critic of the Big Bang theory but also propsed theory of how chemical elements form
Edwin Hubble
American astronomer who determined distances to galaxies and discovered expansion of the universe
Annie Jump Cannon
Harvard "computer" who formulated the sequence of stellar classification
Johannes Kepler
Arguable the first modern scientist and the first truly Copernican astronomer, he was later excommunicated from Luthern church and defended his mother against charges of witchcraft.
Georges Lemaître
Belgian priest who earned proposed the first scientific theory of the creation of the universe
Henrietta Leavitt
Harvard "computer" who investigated Cepheid variable stars and established first cosmic distance scale.
Maria Mitchell
First American woman astronomer; one of the most celebrated American scientists of the 19th century
Isaac Newton
Often regarded as the greatest fgure in the history of science the brilliant, tempermental sceintist formulated laws of motion, gravity, optics and invented calculus.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
First woman to be award a Ph.D. from Harvard, she found a method to determine the chemical composition of stars
Harlow Shapley
American astronomer who determined the solar system's location in our galaxy
al-Sufi
Tenth century Arab astronomer who sought to combine Ptolemy's star catalog with Arab tradition and terminology of stars and constellations
James Van Allen
Iowa-born space physicist whose instruments aboard America's first spacecraft made the first discovery of the Space Age
Fritz Zwicky
Irascible astronomer who theorized the existence of dark matter