Continued from Previous Page
- 1701: Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius devises the centigrade temperature scale.
- 1705: Edmund Halley predicts that the comet spotted in 1682 will return in 1758.
- 1754: The heliometer, a device designed to measure the diameter of the sun, is invented by John Dollond. It is also used to measure distances between stars.
- 1757: John Campbell invents the sextant.
- 1758: Dolland invents a chromatic lens. As predicted by Edmund Halley, the 1682 comet returns, and is thereafter named Halley's Comet.
- 1762: James Bradley publishes a star catalogue, containing the measured positions of 60,000 stars.
- 1781: William Herschel discovers Uranus and recognises star systems outside our galaxy.
- 1796: Pierre Laplace develops the theory of the origin of the universe.
- 1798: Laplace predicts the existence of black holes.
- 1801: Thomas Young publishes proof of the principle of interference of light, supporting the wave theory of light. The first asteroid is discovered when Giuseppe Piazzi identifies Ceres.
- 1820: The Royal Astronomical Society is founded.
- 1838: Friedrich Bessel makes the first measurement of the distance of a star from the Earth, calculating the distance of 61 Cygni to be approximately 6 light years away; the true value is later calculated as approximately 12 light years.
- 1840: John Draper makes the first daguerreotype image of the Moon.
- 1846: The 8th planet, Neptune, is discovered by Johann Galle.
- 1849: The first US astronomical publication is instigated: the Astronomical Journal.
- 1850: William Bond takes the first photographic image of a star (Vega).
- 1865: Jules Verne publishes From Here to the Earth, mentioning the exact velocity that the cannon shot the three travelers to the moon (an object must have a velocity of seven miles a second to escape the Earth's gravity).
- 1866: Great Leonid meteor showers.
- 1887: AA Michelson and EW Morley experimentally demonstrate the constancy of the speed of light.
- 1895: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky publishes a series of papers describing space flight.
- 1900: Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, in a lecture to the German Physical Society, announces that matter absorbs heat energy and emits light energy discontinuously, giving birth to quantum mechanics.
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