Gary Alan Wegner (born Seattle, Washington on December 26, 1944) is an American astronomer, the endowed Leede '49 Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College, and recipient of the Alexander Von Humboldt Prize.
Wegner was also a member of a famous group of seven astronomers called the Seven Samurai who, in the 1980s, discovered the location of the Great Attractor.
[5][6][7] As a youth, he constructed a large telescope in his backyard, and received a Westinghouse Science Talent Search award[8] when he was in high school, earning him a trip to Washington D.C.[9] Gary Wegner received his BSc degree from the University of Arizona in 1967, and his PhD degree in Astronomy from the University of Washington in 1971.
[2] Gary Wegner was a member of a group of astronomers known as the "Seven Samurai" which postulated the existence of the Great Attractor, a huge, diffuse region of material around 250 million light-years away that results in the observed motion of our local galaxies.
[1] He is the father of Josef Wegner, professor of Egyptology at the University of Pennsylvania and discoverer of the tomb of pharaoh Woseribre Senebkay.