People Nominees

Every idea comes from a specific head. The very thought of imagination requires people. These represent, with apologies to Walt Disney, the imagineers of Astronomy and Space Exploration. Without them, we’d be nothing but apes throwing bones at an alien black monolith (wait, wasn’t that in the Popular Culture category?).

Now, we did have to make some rules for the People category. They made sense to most of the participants. We didn’t allow anyone to nominate someone they happened to be related to and we didn’t allow any living people to be nominated. If we were really thinking, we would have made the requirement be they had to have released their mortal coil at least twenty-five years ago.

The Original Nominations

The following candidates were nominated under the People category. Highlighted candidates have a separate description page already posted to this site. To view any highlighted nominees, place your cursor anywhere over the text of the nominee and click (pop-ups must be enabled on your browser):

Anaximander (c610-c546BC)
Pythagoras (c580-c500BC)
Anaxagoras (c500-c428BC)
Aristotle (384-322BC)
Aristarchus of Samos (280-264BC)
Eratosthenes (c276-c194BC)
Hipparchus of Nicaea (146-127BC)
Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus: c100-c178)
Albategnius (c858-929)
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Hans Lippershey (1570-1619)
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
Johann Daniel Titius (1729-1796)
Charles Messier (1730-1817)
Sir William Herschel (1738-1822)
Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)
Johann Elert Bode (1747-1826)
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)
W.C. Bond (1789-1859) (first photograph of star [Vega] – 1850)
John Frederick William Herschel (1792-1871)
John William Draper (1811-1882) (first photograph of Moon – c. 1840)
Percival Lowell (1855-1916)
Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921)
Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944)
Robert Goddard (1882-1945)
Harlow Shapley (1885-1972)
Edwin Hubble (1889-1953)
Georges Édouard Lemaître (1894-1966)
Mikhail Klavdiyevich (1900-1974)
Jan Hendrik Oort (1900-1992)
Karl Guthe Jansky (1905-1950)
Gerard Peter Kuiper (1905-1973)
Hans Bethe (1906-2005)
Clyde William Tombaugh (1906-1997)
Bengt Georg Daniel Strömgren (1908-1987)
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995)
Werner von Braun (1912-1977)
Carl Fredrich von Weizsäcker (1912-2007)
Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

Not all the nominees made the top 100. Still, we’ve tried to include a short write-up on each of them. Any nominee that finished in the top 100 greatest images and imaginations in astronomy and space exploration will have its rank listed in the upper left hand corner of the specific page devoted to that nominee.