The Most Famous
ASTRONOMERS from Slovakia
This page contains a list of the greatest Slovak Astronomers. The pantheon dataset contains 531 Astronomers, 3 of which were born in Slovakia. This makes Slovakia the birth place of the 28th most number of Astronomers behind Greece and Australia.
Top 3
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Slovak Astronomers of all time. This list of famous Slovak Astronomers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Maximilian Hell (1720 - 1792)
With an HPI of 53.96, Maximilian Hell is the most famous Slovak Astronomer. His biography has been translated into 19 different languages on wikipedia.
Maximilian Hell (Hungarian: Hell Miksa) (born Rudolf Maximilian Höll; May 15, 1720 – April 14, 1792) was an astronomer and an ordained Jesuit priest from the Kingdom of Hungary. The lunar crater Hell is named after him.
2. Ľudmila Pajdušáková (1916 - 1979)
With an HPI of 43.48, Ľudmila Pajdušáková is the 2nd most famous Slovak Astronomer. Her biography has been translated into 15 different languages.
Ľudmila Pajdušáková (29 June 1916 – 6 October 1979) was a Slovak astronomer. She specialized in solar astronomy, and also discovered a number of comets, including periodic comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková, and the non-periodic C/1946 K1 (Pajdušáková-Rotbart-Weber), C/1948 E1 (Pajdušáková-Mrkos), C/1951 C1 (Pajdušáková) and C/1953 X1 (Pajdušáková). She observed at Skalnaté Pleso Observatory and became its third director from 1958 to 1979. The asteroid 3636 Pajdušáková is named after her. She may have been married to Antonín Mrkos. In a 1951 "Comet Notes" article in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific [PASP 63 (1951) 209], Leland E. Cunningham in discussing comet C/1951 C1 refers to her as "Miss Pajdušáková (Mrs. Mrkos)", and there was an astronomy book published in 1956 by Ľudmila Mrkosová-Pajdušáková, as well as various scientific papers under this name from approximately 1952–1958. However, their respective biographies do not seem to mention any such marriage.
3. Peter Kušnirák (1974 - )
With an HPI of 32.21, Peter Kušnirák is the 3rd most famous Slovak Astronomer. His biography has been translated into 18 different languages.
Peter Kušnirák (born 1974) is a Slovak astronomer, discoverer of minor planets, and a prolific photometrist of light-curves at Ondřejov Observatory in the Czech Republic. He was married to Slovak astronomer Ulrika Babiaková with whom he discovered 123647 Tomáško, named after their son Tomáško. He was the principal observer to discover that the two main-belt asteroids 3073 Kursk and 5481 Kiuchi are in fact binary asteroids. In 1999, he discovered the Eunomian main-belt asteroid 24260 Kriváň, which he named after one Slovakia's national symbols, as well as 21656 Knuth and 20256 Adolfneckař, both located in the Aquarius constellation at the time. He is based out of numerous observatories in the Czech Republic, including the Ondřejov Observatory, and works solo or with partners. The Flora asteroid 17260 Kušnirák, discovered by the U.S. LINEAR project at Lincoln Lab's ETS in 2000, is named in his honor (M.P.C. 10060).
Pantheon has 3 people classified as astronomers born between 1720 and 1974. Of these 3, 1 (33.33%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living astronomers include Peter Kušnirák. The most famous deceased astronomers include Maximilian Hell and Ľudmila Pajdušáková.
