Astro Anniversaries
February
Day | Year | Event |
1 Feb | 2003 | Space Shuttle STS-107 (Columbia) broke up on re-entry, claiming the lives of the seven crew. |
3 Feb | 1882 | Mocs meteorite fall in Romania. |
3 Feb | 1966 | The Russian Luna 9 probe became the first spacecraft to soft-land on the moon. |
3 Feb | 2002 | Alby sur Cheran meteorite fall – it hit a building in France. |
4 Feb | 1906 | Clyde Tombaugh born. Discoverer of Pluto. |
4 Feb | 1947 | John Brown born. The tenth Astronomer Royal for Scotland. Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. |
5 Feb | 1959 | NASA forms a working group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to formulate plans for future lunar exploration. |
5 Feb | 1974 | Mariner 10 became the first spacecraft to use gravity assist in a fly-by of Venus in order to reach Mercury. |
5 Feb | 2002 | HESSI (High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager) solar flare observatory launched on a mission to explore the physics of particle acceleration and energy release in solar flares. |
6 Feb | 1923 | Edward Barnard died. Barnard was a professional astronomer who discovered the high proper motion of Barnard’s Star in 1916, which is named in his honour. |
7 Feb | 1824 | William Huggins born. He was the pioneer in taking and understanding the spectra of stars and nebulae. |
7 Feb | 1984 | Bruce McCandless became the first orbiting astronaut to let go of the tether to the Space Shuttle, wearing the Manned Manoeuvring Unit to allow him to return to the spacecraft. |
8 Feb | 1992 | Ulysses probe arrived at Jupiter for a fly-by as part of its mission to study the Sun at all latitudes above the plane of the ecliptic. |
8 Feb | 1974 | Fritz Zwicky died. Zwicky was a Swiss astronomer who worked mainly at the California Institute of Technology in the USA. He was the first scientist to postulate the existence of dark matter. |
9 Feb | 1811 | Nevil Maskelyne died. Maskelyne was the fifth Astronomer Royal. He introduced the Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris for use in navigation at sea. |
10 Feb | 1842 | Agnes Mary Clerke born. Irish astronomer and writer. |
10 Feb | 1944 | Eugène Antoniadi died. Antoniadi was an observer of Mercury, Venus and Mars. He made the first map of Mercury and introduced the Antoniadi seeing scale. |
10 Feb | 2002 | Solar Orbiter launched to perform detailed measurements of the inner heliosphere and nascent solar wind, and perform close observations of the polar regions of the Sun. |
12 Feb | 1947 | Sikhote Alin meteorite fall in Russia. |
13 Feb | 1852 | John Dreyer born. Dreyer compiled the New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars (NGC). |
14Feb | 1896 | Arthur Milne born. A Hull-born astrophysicist whose research included stellar atmospheres and cosmology. The EA Milne Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Hull is named in his honour. |
14 Feb | 1898 | Fritz Zwicky born. |
14 Feb | 1950 | Karl Jansky died. An American physicist and radio engineer who discovered radio waves emanating from the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius. |
14 Feb | 1990 | The ‘Pale Blue Dot’ photograph of Earth was taken by Voyager 1 from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometres (40.5 au), as part of that day’s Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System. |
15 Feb | 1564 | Galileo Galilei born. |
15 Feb | 1845 | The Leviathan of Parsonstown, the world’s largest telescope from 1845 to 1917, saw first light. |
15 Feb | 1858 | William Pickering born. |
16 Feb | 1827 | Mhow meteorite fall – it reportedly wounded a man in India. |
16 Feb | 1948 | Gerard Kuiper discovered Miranda, one of the satellites of Uranus. |
17 Feb | 1723 | Tobias Mayer born. |
17 Feb | 1919 | Walter Stibbs born. Australian astronomer. Napier Professor of Astronomy and Director of the University Observatory at the University of St Andrews (1959-89). |
18 Feb | 1930 | Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, a 23-year old observing assistant at the Lowell Observatory, by using a blink comparator on photographs which he had taken in the previous month at the observatory. |
18 Feb | 1992 | Sylvain Arend died. Arend was a Belgian astronomer whose main interest was astrometry. Together with Georges Roland, he discovered the bright comet C/1956 R1 (Arend-Roland). |
19 Feb | 1473 | Nicolaus Copernicus born. Copernicus formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at its centre. |
19 Feb | 2020 | Heather Couper died. British astronomer, broadcaster and science populariser. |
20 Feb | 1762 | Tobias Mayer died. German astronomer famous for his studies of the Moon. He developed a theory on the motion of the Moon and produced the lunar tables used in the Nautical Alamanc and Astronomical Ephemeris for navigation at sea. |
20 Feb | 1962 | Mercury-Atlas 6 spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral with astronaut John Glenn, who was the first American to orbit the earth. |
20 Feb | 1997 | The Galileo spacecraft performed a fly-by of Jupiter’s moon Europa. |
20 Feb | 2002 | San Michele meteorite fall (hit building in Italy). |
21 Feb | 1900 | Charles Piazzi Smyth died. The second Astronomer Royal for Scotland. Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. |
22 Feb | 1824 | Carl Janssen born. French astronomer who, along with Norman Lockyer, discovered the gaseous nature of the solar chromosphere. |
23 Feb | 1987 | Supernova 1987A in the neighbouring Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy became visible from the southern hemisphere. It has been the best-studied exploding star of all time. |
25 Feb | 1786 | Thomas Wright died. A British astronomer who described the shape of the Milky Way and speculated that faint nebulae were distant galaxies. |
25 Feb | 1997 | Juancheng meteorite fall – it hit a house in China. |
25 Feb | 2002 | Mariner 6 was launched to study the surface and atmosphere of Mars during close fly-bys. |
26 Feb | 1842 | Camille Flammarion born. French astronomer and author. |
27 Feb | 1942 | James Stanley Hey discovered radio waves coming from the Sun for the first time – these were from a very active sunspot group. |
29 Feb | 1820 | Lewis Swift born. Swift was an American astronomer who discovered 13 comets and 1,248 previously uncatalogued nebulae. |
LAST UPDATED: 2024-01-31