1837-1882 American astronomer and professor of medicine who took the first photographs of the Orion nebula (1880) and the spectrum of a star (Vega, 1872). He built the instruments he used for these and other photographs, including images of the moon...

Henry Draper (March 7, 1837 – November 20 1882) was an American doctor and astronomer. Henry Draper's father, John William Draper, was an accomplished doctor, chemist, botanist, and professor at New York University; he was also the first to...

Ralph Alpher, a physicist whose pioneering work on the underpinnings of the "Big Bang" theory went unheralded for years while others won a Nobel Prize, has died. He was 86.Alpher died Aug. 12 in Austin, Texas. He had been honored by President Bush with a...