Johannes Hevelius

Johannes Hevelius, also known as Jan Heweliusz, who lived from 1611 to 1687, was a councillor and chairman of the city council of the Old Town of Gdansk, then in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and as an astronomer gained a reputation as the founder of lunar topography. The son of a wealthy brewing family, he studied jurisprudence at Leiden in 1630, travelled in England and France and met Pierre Gassendi, Marin Mersenne and Athanasius Kircher, and settled in his native town in 1634. From 1639 his chief interest was astronomy, and in 1641 he built an observatory known as Sternenburg on the roofs of his three connected houses, equipped with splendid instruments including a Keplerian telescope of 46 metres focal length. He described ten new constellations, seven of which are still used by astronomers, and enjoyed the patronage of four Polish kings. Edmond Halley visited him in 1679 as emissary of the Royal Society, of which Hevelius had been a fellow since 1664.