Astro Anniversaries

April

Day	Year	Event
1	1960	Tiros 1 (Television and InfraRed Observation Satellite) launched – the first weather observation satellite and the first to take a television image of the Earth from space.
1	2010	Henry Hatfield died. An amateur astronomer and much respected member of the BAA. Well-known for his Photographic Lunar Atlas which was first published in 1968.
2	1845	Hippolyte Fizeau and Leon Foucault in France took the first photograph of the Sun in 1845, using the daguerreotype process.
2	1958	President Eisenhower proposed the establishment of NASA in a special message to the US Congress.
3	2014	NASA announced that the Cassini orbiter had found evidence of an underground body of water on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn.
6	1893	A rare Hybrid Solar Eclipse took place – this is when an annular and a total eclipse take place together, where the former becomes the latter and then usually reverts back. There will be only seven such eclipses in the 21st century.
7	2001	The Mars Odyssey orbiter was launched to map and search for water on Mars.
8	1960	Frank Drake began observations for Project Ozma in 1960 at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the first serious search for radio signals from extra-terrestrial civilizations.
8	2016	Elizabeth “Pat” Roemer died. An American astronomer and educator, Pat Roemer specialized in astronomy, with a particular focus on comets and minor planets. She was well-known for the recovery of lost comets, as well as for her discovery of two asteroids, the co-discovery of Jupiter’s moon Themisto, and for the asteroid 1657 Roemera that was named in her honour.
9	1907	Percival Lowell discovered Minor Planet 793, which he named ‘Arizona’ after the state where his Lowell Observatory is located.
10	2002	Yuji Hyakutake died. He was a Japanese amateur astronomer who discovered the splendid Comet C/1996 B2, also known as Comet Hyakutake on January 31, 1996, while using 25×150 binoculars to look for C/1995 Y1, a comet he had discovered a few weeks before.
11	1879	Bernhard Schmidt born. In 1930 he invented the Schmidt telescope which corrected for the optical errors of spherical aberration, coma, and astigmatism, making possible the construction of very large, wide-angled cameras with short exposure time for astronomical research.
12	1817	Charles Messier died. A French astronomer who published a catalogue of 110 galaxies, nebulae and star clusters to prevent astronomers mistaking these objects for comets. The objects were numbered and catalogued with the prefix ‘M’, and came to be known as the Messier objects (eg M31 is the Andromeda galaxy).
12	1961	Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space when he was launched into orbital flight in Vostok 1.
12	2010	Douglas Walter Noble Stibbs died. Prof Stibbs was an Australian astronomer and astrophysicist, remembered for his work at St Andrews University where he held the Napier Chair in Astronomy for 30 years.
14	1629	Christiaan Huygens born. He was pioneering physicist and astronomer, born in the Hague in the Netherlands. Huygens went on to discover Saturn’s largest moon and characterise its ring system, invent the pendulum clock and suggest the equation for centripetal force, amongst many other contributions to science.
15	1452	Leonardo Da Vinci born. He discussed the ‘ashen glow’ of the Moon, the phenomenon appearing as a ghostly glow of the Moon’s full orb which today we call ‘earthshine’.
17	1971	The first space station, Salyut 1, was launched into orbit by Russia.
18	1949	Will Hay died. A famous comedian and actor, he is noted for having discovered a Great White Spot on the planet Saturn in 1933. Hay kept his career in astronomy separate from his comedy career and published Through My Telescope under the name of W.T. Hay. He was an advocate for education on astronomy and gave public lectures on the subject.
19	1982	The Salyut 7 space station was launched.
24	1906	Richard van der Riet Woolley born. An English astronomer who became the 11th Astronomer Royal (1956 -1971). Woolley specialized in solar astronomy and in 1939 he was appointed director of the Commonwealth Solar Observatory in Canberra, Australia.
24	1957	The first edition of BBC television’s The Sky at Night programme was broadcast. It was introduced by Paul Johnstone, but featured Patrick Moore who presented the programme until his death in December 2012, making him the longest-running host of the same TV programme ever.
24	1990	The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit around the Earth.
25	1918	Gérard de Vaucouleurs born. He was a French astronomer known for his work in extragalactic astronomy. He developed a classification system for galaxies based on their morphology. He served as the director of the University of Texas McDonald Observatory.
26	1920	The Shapley-Curtis debate on the nature of the ‘spiral nebulae’ was held in 1920 at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. It showed the division among astronomers about whether or not our Milky Way galaxy constituted the entirety of the universe.
27	1933	Karl Jansky made the first public announcement (at a meeting of the International Scientific Radio Union in Washington, DC) of his discovery of radio waves from the centre of our galaxy – thus began the field of Radio Astronomy.
28	1900	Jan Oort born. Oort established the existence of the distant region of comets now called the Oort Cloud.
28	1926	Vincent Reddish born. 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).
28	1928	Eugene Shoemaker born. Shoemaker was an American geologist and planetary scientist who made significant contributions to the study of impact craters and the formation of the Solar System. He co-discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 which collided with Jupiter in July 1994.
29	2001	Aerospace engineer and financial analyst Dennis Tito became the first space tourist at the age of 60. He paid $20 million to fly aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and spend a week on the International Space Station (ISS).
30	1967	The first image of the Earth was taken from the Moon’s surface by the Surveyor 3 lander.

LAST UPDATED: 2023-04-07