Barnard, Edward Emerson (1857-1923)

US observational astronomer. He discovered the fifth satellite of Jupiter in 1892 and the swiftly moving 10th-magnitude Barnard's star in 1916. He was the first to realize that the apparent voids in the Milky Way are in fact dark nebulae of dust and gas.

He discovered his first comet 1881 and by 1892 he had found 16. He also investigated the surface features of Jupiter.

Barnard was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and from the age of nine worked as an assistant in a photographic studio. As a child he was fond of observing the heavenly bodies with a toy telescope. This fascination with astronomy led him to take a job in the observatory at Vanderbilt University 1883, where he spent most of his time using the telescopes. He went to California to work at the Lick Observatory when it opened 1888. In 1895 he took up the chair of practical astronomy at the University of Chicago and became astronomer at the Yerkes Observatory, Wisconsin, where he made many important discoveries, amongst which were the dark nebulae; he catalogued 182 of these. He participated in an expedition to Sumatra, Indonesia, to observe the 1901 solar eclipse.