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I continue to try to rehabilitate the reputation of Sharpless in My recent Science thread about the discovery of the spiral structure of the Milky Way:
Sharpless is something of a mystery man, having largely disappeared scientifically after his last publication in 1986 (which was decades before his death).
Furthermore, his scientific reputation is very small compared to that of Donald Osterbrock and W.W.Morgan, the other co-authors of the famous 1951-2 work that first showed the nearby spiral arms of our Galaxy. Also, Sharpless has largely disappeared from the history of astronomy, except for his catalog of nebulae and his very early work on the spiral structure of the MW.
The name of Sharpless is well known to people who love nebulae, but the extant sources on the internet seem unable to answer the question:
Who was Stewart Lane Sharpless?
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