1656-1742

English astronomer and physicist famous for predicting the 1758 return of Halley's comet and for the instrumental role he played in the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia. Halley established the Southern Hemisphere's first observatory and published the first telescopically based star catalog of the southern skies. He conducted research on tidal phenomena (1684-1701), proposed a core-fluid-crust model to explain the westward drift of Earth's magnetic field (1692), and was the first to detect the proper motions of stars (1718).