John Flamsteed alone personally donated some forty man-years to the monumental effort of mapping the heavens. As the first astronomer royal, Flamsteed conducted 30,000 individual observations, all dutifully recorded and confirmed with telescopes he built himself or bought at his own expense. Flamsteed’s finished star catalog tripled the number of entries in the sky atlas Tycho Brahe had compiled at Uraniborg in Denmark, and improved the precision of the census by several orders of magnitude. Limited as he was to the skies
