On December 16 in 1857, astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard is born into poverty in Nashville, Tennessee. Barnard only received two months' formal education in his life. Because his father had died two years before, he went to work in a photo studio to support his family at age 9. Later he obtained a number of prestigious academic positions, including the Lick Observatory and the University of Chicago, where he made important discoveries. These included Barnard's Runaway Star (the star with the fastest relative speed ever discovered) and Barnard's satellite (the fifth moon of Jupiter, which was the first Jupiter satellite discovered since Galileo and the only satellite ever named after its discoverer). He and Maximilian Wolf were the first to realize that dark nebulae in the Milky Way are clouds of dust and gas.
—from The Illustrated Almanac of Science, Technology, and Invention