Astronomer for All Seasons: Heber D. Curtis

Mercury, May/June 2001 Table of Contents

Heber D. Curtis

Heber D. Curtis was the first to prove that there were galaxies beyond our Milky Way.

by Donald E. Osterbrock

Like Sir Thomas More, the "man for all seasons," successively a merchant, a writer, an adviser to the king, an archbishop, a condemned prisoner, and eventually a saint, Heber D. Curtis went through many careers in astronomy. He succeeded in each one of them, but he eventually left the land of big telescopes on his own volition. Today he is best remembered for his most important scientific discovery, that the spiral "nebulae" are really "island universes" or galaxies, like our Milky Way. But most astronomers, conservative then as now, were slow to accept his conclusions.

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