The Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini is best known for discovering Saturn’s moons,
and the biggest division in Saturn’s rings. Cassini made many other important discoveries in the solar system, and in the fields of physics and astronomy. He grew up thinking that the Earth was the center of the universe, and had to re-find his place in the universe as an adult. He grew up believing in astrology, and as an adult became a hard-core, science-focused astrophysicist in the earliest days of that field.
He was born in 1625, and so he was growing up learning about all these things going on, but he got to follow far enough behind them that he had much better optics to play with. Cassini got his PhD at age 25, and he had this interesting joint career where he was working in Bologna, and he was both a fortress builder, and an astronomer. He was both grounded and had his head in the clouds. He was the person who discovered Iapetus, the little white and black, completely funky-colored moon that kind of looks like it ran head-first into something. He was the one who while observing the Saturn’s rings, realized “wait, there’s a gap in those rings,” and that gap now bears his name. It’s the Cassini Division. Cassini also determined the rotation rate of Jupiter, which has features unlike Saturn -- which is kind of beige -- and I think one of the neatest things he did was he was a very careful observer, and he was tied up in trying to understand how to measure time, he was tied up into trying to accurately measure longitude.
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