Johann(es) Fabricius (8 January 1587 - 19 March 1616), eldest son of David Fabricius (1564-1617), was a Frisian/German astronomer and a discoverer of sunspots (in 1610), independently of Galileo Galilei. Read more
Johannes Fabricius published the first scientific manuscript, titled De Maculis in Sole observatis et Apparente earum cum Sole Conversione Narratio (Narration on Spots Observed on the Sun and their Apparent Rotation with the Sun), on sunspots in June 1611. In March of 1611, a German medical student named Johannes Fabricius left school at Leiden in Holland carrying several of the new-fangled telescopes that were beginning to appear in the Netherlands. He was off to visit his father - the well-known astronomer and astrologer David Fabricius who had had a heralded career working with Europe's celebrity astronomers, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Read more