Astro Anniversaries

January

Day	Year	Event
1 Jan	1801	Ceres, the first member of the asteroid belt, was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi. It is now classified as a dwarf planet.
1 Jan	1867	Mary Acworth Orr born. Mary developed an early interest in astronomy and when the Orr family moved to Australia in 1890, she discovered that no useful guide to the southern stars was available and so she published one herself: An Easy Guide to the Southern Stars.
1 Jan	1909	Charles Anthony Federer born. An American astronomer who is probably best remembered for founding, together with his wife Helen Spence Federer, the well known and highly respected astronomy magazine Sky and Telescope.
1 Jan	1925	Astronomer Edwin Hubble formally presented his discovery that galaxies lie outside the Milky Way at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
1 Jan	1952	The Kyiv Planetarium was opened in Kyiv, Ukraine.
2 Jan	1892	George Biddell Airy died. A British mathematician and astronomer, and the seventh Astronomer Royal from 1835 to 1881.
2 Jan	1959	Luna 1 was launched as part of the the Soviet Luna Programme. It was the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon, but a malfunction in the ground-based control system caused an error in the upper stage rocket’s burn time, and the spacecraft missed the Moon by 5,900 km. In doing so, it became the first artificial object to go into orbit around the Sun and was renamed Mechta (Dream) accordingly.
2 Jan	2015	Vincent Reddish died. He was a British astronomer who spent much of his career in Edinburgh, where he made significant contributions to British optical astronomy. He was the 8th Astronomer Royal for Scotland, the Director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh and Regius Professor at the University of Edinburgh (all from 1975–80).
2 Jan	2020	Dr David Gavine died. Known popularly and affectionately to all as ‘Dave’. He was a well-known astronomer and lecturer, with special interests in the aurora and in the history of astronomy.
3 Jan	1877	Warrenton meteorite fall in Missouri. Classified as a stony meteorite and weighing about 45 kg, it struck a tree and broke into pieces.
3 Jan	1888	First light for the 36-inch refracting telescope at the Lick Observatory, the world’s largest telescope from 1888 to 1897.
3 Jan	1999	Mars Polar Lander launched by NASA to study the soil and climate of Planum Australe, a region near the south pole of Mars.
4 Jan	1643	Isaac Newton born.
4 Jan	1797	Wilhelm Beer born. Working with Johann Heinrich von Mädler in Beer’s private observatory in Berlin, he produced the first exact map (and later a description) of the Moon, both of which remained the best available for many years.
4 Jan	2004	Mars rover Spirit landed.
5 Jan	1892	First photograph of the Aurora Borealis taken by Martin Brendel.
5 Jan	1972	President Nixon announced decision that the USA would build a reusable space shuttle.
7 Jan	1610	Galileo Galilei discovered the four large moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto), the first moons ever found around another planet.
7 Jan	1968	Moon lander Surveyor 7 launched.
7 Jan	1998	Moon orbiter Lunar Prospector launched.
8 Jan	1642	Galileo Galilei died.
8 Jan	1868	Frank Dyson born. The ninth Astronomer Royal, Dyson is largely remembered today for introducing the Greenwich time signals (‘pips’) and for the role he played in proving Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
8 Jan	1942	Theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking born.
9 Jan	1848	Caroline Herschel died.
9 Jan	1992	Announcement by Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail of the first two exoplanets discovered. The planets were observed orbiting pulsar PSR B1257+12.
10 Jan	1946	First radar signal bounced off the Moon by the US Army Signal Corps using an antenna at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.
11 Jan	1787	William Herschel discovered two moons (Titania and Oberon) around Uranus.
14 Jan	2005	The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe landed on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. It was the first successful landing on a body in the outer Solar System.
16 Jan	1938	William Pickering died. While working at Harvard College Observatory, he developed the Pickering Scale for rating astronomical ‘seeing’ (the blurring of images caused by atmospheric turbulence).
16 Jan	2003	Space Shuttle STS-107 (Columbia) launched. The following month, breakup on re-entry disintegrated the spacecraft and claimed the lives of the seven crew.
17 Jan	1997	Clyde Tombaugh died. Discovered Pluto in 1930.
19 Jan	1747	Johann Bode born. An astronomer known for the Titius-Bode law of planetary distances.
19 Jan	2006	New Horizons probe to Pluto launched.
21 Jan	1892	John Couch Adams died. A British mathematician and astronomer whose most famous achievement was predicting the existence and position of Neptune, although the credit for discovery ultimately (and controversially) went to the French astronomer Le Verrier.
22 Jan	1592	Pierre Gassendi born. Gassendi became the first person to observe the transit of a planet across the Sun, viewing the transit of Mercury in 1631 that had been predicted by Kepler in 1627.
24 Jan	1882	Harold D Babcock born. An astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, he specialised in solar spectroscopy and mapped the distribution of magnetic fields over the Sun’s surface, working alongside his son, Harold W Babcock.
24 Jan	1914	David Gill died. Gill was appointed as Her Majesty’s Astronomer at the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope (1879 to 1907).
25 Jan	1736	Joseph-Louis Lagrange born. An Italian mathematician, physicist and astronomer, later naturalized French. He made significant contributions to the fields of analysis, number theory, and both classical and celestial mechanics.
25 Jan	1742	Edmond Halley died. Predicted the return of Halley’s comet every 76 years.
25 Jan	2004	Mars rover Opportunity landed.
26 Jan	1949	First light for the 200-inch Hale telescope on Mount Palomar in California, under the direction of astronomer Edwin Hubble.
27 Jan	1967	A cabin fire in Apollo 1, while on the launch pad during a launch rehearsal test, claimed the lives of the three crew.
28 Jan	1986	Space Shuttle STS-51-L (Challenger) launched. An explosion shortly after lift-off destroyed the vehicle and claimed the lives of the seven crew.
29 Jan	1771	Charles Green died. Having joined the staff of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1760, in 1763, Green, along with the astronomer Nevil Maskelyne, made the voyage to Barbados to monitor the testing of John Harrison’s H4 chronometer.
31 Jan	1783	The star 40 Eridani B was discovered by William Herschel. In the 20th century, the star was classified as a white dwarf.
31 Jan	1862	The star Sirius B was discovered by Alvan Clark, Jr. As with 40 Eridani B, Sirius B was also classified as a white dwarf in the 20th century.

LAST UPDATED: 2025-01-01