Harlow Shapley, (born November 2, 1885, Nashville, Missouri, U.S.—died October 20, 1972, Boulder, Colorado), American astronomer who deduced that the Sun lies near the central plane of the Milky Way Galaxy and was not at the centre but some 30,000 light-years away. In 1911 Shapley, working with results given by Henry Norris Russell, began finding the dimensions of stars in a number of binary systems from measurements of their light variation when they eclipse one another. These methods remained the standard procedure for more than 30 years. Shapley also showed that Cepheid variables cannot be star pairs that eclipse each