Who is he? Giovanni Domenico Cassini, a modern astronomer

Thank you for this fantastic reviw. Enjoy your reading!

Gabriella Bernardi has a physics degree but is now a science writer, with some specialisation in astronomy.

She wrote several books on this topic, among which The Unforgotten Sisters. Female Astronomers and Scientists before Caroline Herschel (Springer 2016) in which she gives 25 biographies of famous female scientists, mostly astronomers of the past 4000 years.

In the current biography she focusses on Giovanni Domenico Cassini, also known as Jean-Dominique Cassini, or Cassini I, since he was born Italian in 1625 in a small village Perinaldo in the North-West of Italy near the French border, not far from Nice, but later moved to France and he was naturalized with all the privileges of a French born citizen. He is the founder of a dynasty of French astronomers and scientists.

Cassini was educated by Jesuits and was first employed at the observatory of Marquis Malvasia.

Simultaneously he became a professor of astronomy in the University of Bologna in 1650–51 where he replaced Cavalieri, who was a student of Galilei, and had died in 1647. He published his observations of the comet passing by in 1652–53 which brought him some fame. On the floor of the nearby Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna…