Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers

Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers was a German astronomer born on 11 October 1758. He devised a convenient method for calculating the orbits of comets, work that made tracking those icy wanderers less of a guessing game. In 1802 he discovered Pallas, the second asteroid known to science, and five years later, in 1807, he found Vesta, the fourth. Both discoveries arrived at a moment when the space between Mars and Jupiter was revealing itself to be far more crowded than anyone had imagined. He died on 2 March 1840.