John Flamsteed

John Flamsteed (1646-1719), English astronomer and first Astronomer Royal of England. Flamsteed was born in Denby and educated at the free school of Derby and at the University of Cambridge. When the Greenwich Observatory was founded in 1675, Flamsteed was made its first director. In 1676 he began a series of observations that, by exposing and correcting the large number of errors in contemporary astronomical tables, helped mark the beginning of modern practical astronomy. His catalog of the fixed stars, Historia Coelestis Britannica (1725), listing over 3000 stars, was larger than any previous star catalog. Flamsteed's lunar observations furnished the data that his contemporary, the English astronomer and physicist Sir Isaac Newton, used to verify his theory of gravity.