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