Angelo Secchi
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Pietro Angelo Secchi (1818 – February 26, 1878) was an Italian astronomer. Image:Angelo Secchi.jpg
Biography
Born in Reggio Emilia, Father Secchi spent his latter years in Rome, where he died in 1878.
He was a pioneer of astronomical spectroscopy along with Joseph von Fraunhofer. He was a Jesuit and at age 32 became the director of the Vatican Observatory. Through his solar observations, he discovered the existence of solar spicules.
He drew one of the early maps of Mars in 1858, in which he called Syrtis Major the "Atlantic Canal". He thus anticipated Schiaparelli's use of the term canali, although Secchi's canals were not the long straight-line Martian canals of Schiaparelli and Lowell.
The Secchi crater on the Moon and a crater on Mars are named after him. Secchi also developed an oceanographic instrument, nowadays known as a Secchi disk.