births
April 11, 1879
Bernhard Schmidt, Estonian-German astronomer and optician (died 1935)

Bernhard Schmidt
Bernhard Woldemar Schmidt was an Estonian optician. In 1930 he invented the Schmidt telescope, which corrected for the optical errors of spherical aberration, coma, and astigmatism, making possible for the first time the construction of very large, wide-angled reflective cameras of short exposure time for astronomical research.