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Johannes Hevelius

Adapted from Wikipedia · Explorer experience

Portrait of Johannes Hevelius, a 17th-century astronomer, holding a celestial globe.

Johannes Hevelius was a clever man who loved looking at the stars and the Moon. He lived a long time ago in a place called Gdańsk, which is in a country named the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

He built a special room on the roofs of his houses to watch the sky. This room was called an observatory. With his long telescopes, he saw new patterns in the sky. These patterns are called constellations. He found ten new ones, and seven of them are still used today!

Johannes also wrote many books about what he saw in the sky. One of his famous books is called Selenographia. It had a big map of the Moon. Even when a fire destroyed his observatory, he kept looking at the stars and sharing what he learned with others.

Images

An engraving of an observatory built in Gdańsk in the 1640s by astronomer Johannes Hevelius.
Historical document certifying astronomer Johannes Hevelius as an honorary member of the Royal Society in London.
Johannes and Elisabeth Hevelius using a sextant to observe the stars in 1673.
Statue of Jan Heweliusz, a famous astronomer, in Gdańsk, Poland.
An old map of the moon showing its surface features, from a 17th-century astronomical work.
An old astronomical instrument called a quadrant, used by scientists to map the stars and study the night sky.

Related articles

Moon
Constellation

This article is a child-friendly adaptation of the Wikipedia article on Johannes Hevelius, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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