Betelgeuse

Google You can have the DING! for that.

All things are relative. Set a TV soap or a popular sport question and I'd be stumped.

I suppose that would be up to Simply Paul as the owner of the quiz. I've no particular objection if he's ok with it.

There are a heap of clues already given - the canali clue is probably the strongest. However, He was born in 1835 and died in 1910. He was an Italian astronomer and also a science historian. As well as his studies of Mars, he also showed that the Perseid and Leonid meteor showers were associated with comets, in particular, he proved that the orbit of the Leonids and the orbit of the comet Tempel Tuttle were the same leading him to form the hypothesis that meteor showers could be caused by cometary trails. He has craters on both the Moon and Mars named after him. Any takers?

Off by a whisker.

Not Da Vinci. Scarpelli is getting very close indeed but it's not right although the date is definitely in the ballpark. The study was undertaken in Mars' opposition of 1877. The astronomer was the first to identify the 'canali' later misinterpreted as 'canal' as mentioned by Simply Paul in an earlier post.

Right country, right misinterpretation, wrong person.

'Fraid not.

Of course. A mistranslation of one of the terms he used led to what was probably the most famous error in planetary mapping.

Not Lowell, although he did a lot of work on the mapping of Mars.

I see what you did there...

Sticking with Mars themed questions, who produced the first detailed map of Mars?

Barsoom

That will get you the DING!

Weymouth Council cheated! So, no. Not their excuse for a pier.

Neither of those. The pier in question consists of a pavilion on piles abutted directly to the esplanade.

Careful with that petard now... Must have been a pretty low tide - it's short but it's not that short. Wigan pier eh?

As requested by Beach_Hut a quick question about a seaside building. So... Can you tell me which is the shortest pier in Britain?

That would refer to stellar spectral classification

I think it has to be TheOldfields, as the question did ask for both intials. So - DING to TheOldfields. That'll teach me to read the question properly.

Pelham - which is why he was known as 'Plum'

That'll get you the DING! Although the Nobel was awarded for "services to theoretical physics", the substantive piece of work that earned him the prize was the discovery of the Law governing the photoelectric effect. This discovery laid the foundations for future work in quantum physics. Over to MTH

I'm looking for something a bit more specific than either of those answers.

Thanks I've always been a fan of logic puzzles. Albert Einstein, who devised that particular logic puzzle, was also a Nobel Laureate receiving the Nobel prize for Physics in 1921. Can you tell me for which subject he was awarded his Nobel prize?

Ten minutes is about right. It's the German.