Bernhard Schmidt

On this day in 1879, optician Bernhard Schmidt was born on the small island of Naissaar in Estonia. He started out working as a telegraph operator, photographer, and designer before moving on to run an optical workshop in Mittweida, Germany. The telescopes he built for use in his own observatory gained the attention of professional astronomers, and in 1926 Schmidt joined the Hamburg Observatory. In 1930 Schmidt designed the telescope that now bears his name. The Schmidt telescope delivered what previous scopes could not—sharp resolution over large slices of the sky—by combining a spherical mirror with an image-correcting lens. The Palomar Observatory in California installed an 18-inch Schmidt telescope in the 1930s, followed by a 48-inch model (the Samuel Oschin telescope) that has conducted sky surveys and spotted dwarf planets like Eris and Makemake. NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which has discovered thousands of likely planets around other stars, employs a Schmidt design.

Date in History: 30 March 1879