This fun memory card game may help you remember some of the most famous astronomers and people contributed to the astronomy science. The following is a list of the astronomers by year and their contribution to astronomy:
1. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) Polish astronomer who proposed a model of the solar system.
2. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian astronomer often credited with the creation of the optical telescope.
3. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) German astronomer who determined that planets traveled around the sun not in circles but in ellipses.
4. Giovanni Cassini (1625–1712) Italian astronomer who measured how long it took the planets Jupiter and Mars to rotate.
5. Isaac Newton (1643–1727) English astronomer most famous for his work on forces, specifically gravity.
6. Edmond Halley (1656–1742) British scientist who reviewed historical comet sightings and proposed that the comet that had appeared in 1456, 1531, 1607, and 1682 were all the same.
7. Charles Messier (1730–1817) French astronomer who published an astronomical catalogue consisting of 110 nebulae and star clusters, which came to be known as the Messier objects.
8. Henrietta Leavitt (1868-1921) American astronomer who discovered the relation between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variable stars.
9. Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German physicist who proposed a new way of looking at the universe that went beyond current understanding.
10. Edwin Hubble (1899–1953) American astronomer calculated that a small blob in the sky existed outside of the Milky Way.
11. Frank Drake (1930) American astronomer and astrophysicist. He is involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, including the founding of SETI.
12. Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author, who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.
