Pioneers of Astronomy

What this quiz asks

• Who used a telescope like this to discover four moons circling Jupiter in 1610?
• Whose book, published in 1543, placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre of the planets' motions?
• Ptolemy's Almagest, the standard astronomy textbook for well over a thousand years, put what at the centre of the universe?
• Tycho Brahe lost part of his nose in a duel and wore a metal replacement for the rest of his life.
• According to Kepler's first law, what shape are the orbits of the planets around the Sun?
• In 1781 William Herschel spotted which planet from the garden of his house in Bath?
• Copernicus's Sun-centred model still had the planets moving in circles.
• Which ancient Greek astronomer proposed a Sun-centred cosmos some 1,800 years before Copernicus?
• Did Galileo spend his last years under house arrest after his trial by the Roman Inquisition?
• Around 240 BC, Eratosthenes compared the Sun's shadows in two Egyptian cities to measure what?
• William Herschel's sister Caroline became a noted astronomer in her own right. What did she discover several of?
• Select ALL of these that Galileo observed with his telescopes.
• Order these astronomers by when they were born, earliest first.
• In 1923 Edwin Hubble found a Cepheid star in the Andromeda 'nebula'. What did this show?
• Henrietta Swan Leavitt was one of the 'Harvard Computers', a group of women employed to do what?
• Select ALL of these astronomers who did all their work before the telescope was invented.
• In what year was Neptune first seen through a telescope, after its position had been predicted by mathematics?
• Why did Charles Messier compile his famous 18th-century catalogue of fuzzy objects such as nebulae and star clusters?
• Galileo saw strange 'ears' on either side of Saturn. Who first explained them correctly, as a ring around the planet?
• Which 15th-century ruler built a great observatory in Samarkand and compiled a famous star catalogue there?