Here is an interesting historical document in which the late Donald Osterbrock is interviewed about how the first ever map was made of our own Galaxy's spiral structure:
http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4809.html#1
In the early 50s, Osterbrock and Morgan and Sharpless made the first map of the spiral structure in our part of the Milky Way.
Here is the Morgan-Osterbrock-Sharpless diagram of the local spiral arms of our own Galaxy, as updated by Bart Bok in his book "The Milky Way" : :
Sharpless is also famous for an important catalog of nebulae:
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...d.php?t=118987
Note added in edit:
The astronomical publication record of Stewart Lane Sharpless seems to have ended in the mid 1980s when he was around 60, unless he continued to get published in very obscure journals. His last research grants from the University of Rochester also were in the mid 1980s
Perhaps this is why he is very poorly remembered compared to co-authors Donald Osterbrock and W.W. Morgan, who were high-profile astronomers that were generally acknowledged as amongst the most eminent of their generation.