Dr Elly Dekker is a Dutch astronomer and science historian, specialising in the history of astronomy. She studied theoretical physics at Utrecht University. In 1975, she obtained a PhD. in astronomy at Leiden University with the thesis Spiral structure and the dynamics of flat stellar systems supervised by Hendrik C. van de Hulst.From 1978-88 she was curator at the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden. After 1988 she worked as an independent scholar on the history of astronomical models and instruments. From 1993-1995 she was Sackler fellow of the Royal Museums Greenwich. She was awarded the Caird Medal for her work on the museum’s globe collection in 1998.
Her books include The Leiden Sphere. An exceptional seventeenth-century planetarium (Leiden, 1987); with Peter van der Krogt, Globes from the Western World (Zwemmer, London, 1993); Globes at Greenwich. A Catalogue of the Globes and Armillary Spheres in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (Oxford, Greenwich, 1999); Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza: Catalogue of Orbs, Spheres and Globes (Florence, 2004); and Illustrating the Phaenomena: Celestial Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013). Her papers comprise studies on the discovery of the southern celestial sky, on medieval astrolabes and quadrants, on Renaissance globes, and on the history of Renaissance celestial maps.