Chronology of Solar System Astronomy
| -2136 | Chinese astronomers record a solar eclipse. |
| -586 | Thales of Miletus predicts a solar eclipse. |
| -350 | Aristotle argues for a spherical Earth using lunar eclipses and other observations. |
| -280 | Aristarchus uses the size of the Earth's shadow on the Moon to estimate that the Moon's radius is one-third that of the Earth. |
| -200 | Eratosthenes uses shadows to determine that the radius of the Earth is roughly 6,400 km. |
| -150 | Hipparchus uses parallax to determine that the distance to the Moon is roughly 380,000 km. |
| -134 | Hipparchus discovers the precession of the equinoxes. |
| 1512 | Nicholas Copernicus first states his heliocentric theory in Commentariolus. |
| 1543 | Nicholas Copernicus shows that his heliocentric theory simplifies planetary motion tables in De Revolutionibus de Orbium Coelestium. |
| 1577 | Tycho Brahe uses parallax to prove that comets are distant entities and not atmospheric phenomena. |
| 1609 | Johannes Kepler states his first two empirical laws of planetary motion. |
| 1610 | Galileo Galilei discovers Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io. |
| 1610 | Galileo Galilei sees Saturn's rings but does not recognize that they are rings. |
| 1619 | Johannes Kepler states his third empirical law of planetary motion. |
| 1655 | Giovanni Cassini discovers Jupiter's great red spot. |
| 1656 | Christian Huygens identifies Saturn's rings as rings and discovers Titan and the Orion Nebula. |
| 1665 | Giovanni Cassini determines the rotational speeds of Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. |
| 1672 | Giovanni Cassini discovers Rhea. |
| 1672 | Jean Richer and Giovanni Cassini measure the astronomical unit to be about 138,370,000 km. |
| 1675 | Ole Romer uses the orbital mechanics of Jupiter's moons to estimate that the speed of light is about 227,000 km/s. |
| 1705 | Edmund Halley publicly predicts the periodicity of Halley's comet and computes its expected path of return in 1758. |
| 1715 | Edmund Halley calculates the shadow path of a solar eclipse. |
| 1716 | Edmund Halley suggests a high-precision measurement of the Sun-Earth distance by timing the transit of Venus. |
| 1758 | Johann Palitzsch observes the return of Halley's comet. |
| 1766 | Johann Titius finds the Titius-Bode rule for planetary distances. |
| 1772 | Johann Bode publicizes the Titius-Bode rule for planetary distances. |
| 1781 | William Herschel discovers Uranus during a telescopic survey of the northern sky. |
| 1796 | Pierre Laplace states his nebular hypothesis for the formation of the solar system from a spinning nebula of gas and dust |
| 1801 | Giuseppe Piazzi discovers the asteroid Ceres. |
| 1802 | Heinrich Olbers discovers the asteroid Pallas. |
| 1821 | Alexis Bouvard detects irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. |
| 1825 | Pierre Laplace completes his study of gravitation, the stability of the solar system, tides, the precession of the equinoxes, the libration of the Moon, and Saturn's rings in Mecanique Celeste. |
| 1843 | John Adams predicts the existence and location of Neptune from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. |
| 1846 | Urbain Leverrier predicts the existence and location of Neptune from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus. |
| 1846 | Johann Galle discovers Neptune. |
| 1846 | William Lassell discovers Triton. |
| 1849 | Edouard Roche finds the limiting radius of tidal destruction and tidal creation for a body held together only by its self gravity and uses it to explain why Saturn's rings do not condense into a satellite. |
| 1856 | James Clerk Maxwell demonstrates that a solid ring around Saturn would be torn apart by gravitational forces and argues that Saturn's rings consist of a multitude of tiny satellites. |
| 1866 | Giovanni Schiaparelli realizes that meteor streams occur when the Earth passes through the orbit of a comet that has left debris along its path. |
| 1906 | Max Wolf discovers the Trojan asteroid Achilles. |
| 1930 | Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto. |
| 1930 | Seth Nicholson measures the surface temperature of the Moon. |
| 1950 | Jan Oort suggests the presence of a cometary Oort cloud. |
| 1951 | Gerard Kuiper argues for an annular reservoir of comets between 40-100 astronomical units from the Sun. |
| 1977 | James Elliot discovers the rings of Uranus during a stellar occultation experiment on the Kuiper Airborne Observatory. |
| 1978 | James Christy discovers Charon. |
| 1978 | Peter Goldreich and Scott Tremaine present a Boltzmann equation model of planetary-ring dynamics for indestructible spherical ring particles that do not self-gravitate and find a stability requirement relation between ring optical depth and particle normal restitution coefficient. |
| 1988 | Martin Duncan, Thomas Quinn, and Scott Tremaine demonstrate that short-period comets come primarily from the Kuiper Belt and not the Oort cloud. |