To coincide with the International Year of Astronomy, the British Royal Astronomical Society is highlighting an unsung pioneer. Thomas Harriot, who lived from 1560 to 1621, was the first person to draw a celestial object through a telescope, says University of Oxford historian Allan Chapman.

This image is his map of the Moon. Although this was probably not finished till 1613, one of Harriot’s sketches was made in 1609 several months before Italian Johnny-come-lately Galileo Galilei, says Chapman. Harriot would later say Harriot’s friend William Lower would later write to him, saying of the Moon, “she appears like a tarte that my cooke made me the laste weeke”.

Chapman has noted previously that the exact dates of Galilei’s observations are not entirely clear. And Harvard historian of science Owen Gingerich, says Harriot’s “telescopic drawings of the moon were strongly influenced by what he saw in Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius”.

Whoever was first, there is here, as Gingerich notes, a motto for all scientists: publish or perish.

More

‘English Galileo’ maps on display – BBC

Did an Englishman beat Galileo to the first moon observation? – Guardian

We like the moon – video

Chapman’s new article on Harriot will be published in the February edition of ‘Astronomy and Geophysics’.

Image: Lord Egremont