Giovanni Schiaparelli

Giovanni Schiaparelli was an Italian astronomer and science historian famous for his telescopic observations of Mars, especially his 1877 description of linear surface features he called canali, Italian for channels, a term mistranslated into English as canals and later fueling speculation about artificial Martian waterways that Schiaparelli himself never endorsed. He also established the system of Martian nomenclature, using Latin names drawn from classical antiquity, that remains the basis for naming Martian surface features today. Separately, he demonstrated that the orbit of the Leonid meteor shower matched the orbit of the comet Tempel-Tuttle, establishing the connection between meteor showers and the orbits of comets. Schiaparelli graduated from the University of Turin in 1854, studied further in Berlin under Johann Franz Encke, worked briefly at the Pulkovo Observatory near Saint Petersburg, and then directed the Brera Observatory in Milan from 1862 for more than forty years. He was appointed an Italian senator in 1889 and received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1872 and the Bruce Medal in 1902.