Starting in the late 19th century, the Harvard Observatory hired women to study stars via the Astronomical Photographic Glass Plate Collection. Some of these women—such as Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Leavitt, and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin—made discoveries that changed astrophysics forever. However, they were far from the only women working at the Harvard Observatory during the era of astronomical glass

This paper discusses measurements of the apparent diameter and parallax of the star Sirius, made in the early 18th century by Jacques Cassini, and how those measurements were discussed by other writers. Of particular interest is how other writers accepted Cassini’s measurements, but then discussed Sirius and other stars as though they were all the same size as the sun. Cassini’s measurements, by contrast

Jan Walery Jędrzejewicz was a medical doctor with active practice in Płońsk and an astronomer by passion. In fact, astronomy was a second profession for ‘Dr. Jedrzejewicz’, as he signed his astronomical publications. He built his own observatory in Płońsk, small village situated about 70 km from Warsaw, which he equipped with professional instruments. Thanks to that, he could perform precise astronomical

In 1551, Georg Rheticus published a compact set of tables that effectively completed the set of all six trigonometric functions. However, his work was not widespread, and may not have been known to Francesco Maurolico when he published a secant table in 1558. Before the end of the century, several authors argued whether Maurolico had borrowed the notion of the secant, and his table, from Rheticus.

In Chapter 16 of Astronomia nova, Kepler describes and applies a method for finding the parameters of what he will call the vicarious hypothesis: a model that still assumes circular orbits and an equant point, but does not assume the bisection of the eccentricity, that is, that the center of the orbit is halfway between the equant point and the Sun. The method allows Kepler to find independently both

This article pursues two main goals: (1) to reconstruct the history of the 12 zodiac constellation system in the astronomy of ancient Mesopotamia; (2) to reveal traces of this system directly in cuneiform texts. Among the most important circumstances led to appearance of this system: (1) development of ideas about the band of zodiac constellations, including—according to MUL.APIN—the total of 18 (or

A common aspect of the practice-oriented side of pre- and early modern mathematical astronomy was the computation of ephemerides, that is, tables that displayed the daily positions of the planets in a synoptic and calendrical format. Even though medieval Europe was no exception in this regard, the existence of ephemerides in this period and region has gone largely unnoticed, owing both to terminological

The article explores Johannes Kepler’s abortive attempts to produce an opulent, decorative art object to accompany the publication of his first treatise, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). It was Kepler’s hope that this Credentzbecher, so-called because it was designed to resemble a large, ceremonial chalice, would valorize the significance of what he believed to be an epoch-defining discovery concerning

The Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) has been the main method of study of the dynamics of the Sun-Earth-Moon system since 1969 to present. Lunar parts of the three modern high-precision ephemerides of the Solar system bodies are based solely on LLR measurements: DE (USA), EPM (Russia), INPOP (France). LLR measurements allow to determine parameters of lunar orbital and rotational motion, as well as some parameters

The historical evidence from the past two millennia show two problems concerning the star Algol (β Per): First, a critical variation in its brightness from a magnitude m ~ 2 in (1) Ptolemy’s Almagest (2nd century AD) and reported by (2) al-Ṣūfī (10th ct.) through its diminution to m = 4 in (3) the star catalog prepared by the Persian astronomers in service of the Yuan dynasty of China in the 13th ct

including catalogues of collections. Indeed, during the COVID-19 pandemic “lockdown,” a good number of museums, libraries, and even publishers greatly augmented digital access to their material. And, because of the closures of libraries, many people have not had the same level of access to printed volumes that they have had to digital resources. However, this splendid volume embodies the argument that

1. A.O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948). 2. S.J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); M.J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge: Cambridge

were no traces of criticism (p. 281) and that the physical knowledge of comets had changed most (p. 327). In sum, based on a systematic view on myriads of printed texts and images from three different periods, the book gives instructive impressions of the fascinating history of early modern cometary knowledge and its (trans)formations. It profits from the author’s structured approach and her strengths

As witnessed by its 45-page bibliography, Peebles’ book is based on exhaustive historical documentation. It makes excellent use of both primary and secondary sources, including his own recollections and personal communications from some of his colleagues which add valuable information that cannot be found elsewhere. However, the historical perspective is largely limited to the technical and scientific

audience and the differentiation of strata of culture (philosophers and savants who wrote for their peers in new communicative media or to free the ‘public’ from superstitious beliefs). These later editions also reflect a growing disintegration of the ‘integrated theory’ that had generated a cultural object shared by the whole of the society and for which the Flugschriften served as a discursive genre

latter part of the nineteenth century onward. Its main strength, which I contend is all the more important given the uncertainties inherent in our leading cosmological theories, lies in its scope; in particular, it does not shy away from describing ideas that have not gained acceptance. One example is its analysis of debates over duelling cosmological viewpoints – as they indeed arose in historical

Between 2017 and 2019, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum acquired a collection of photoelectric tubes used in the earliest program of astronomical photoelectric photometry at the University of Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Collection of Photoelectric Detectors represents a unique look inside the development of a pioneering research project and a fledgling technology. The process by which techniques

In 1782 José Monteiro da Rocha, astronomer and professor at the University of Coimbra, presented, in a public session of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, a memoire on the problem of the determination of the orbits of comets. Only in 1799 would the “Determinação das Orbitas dos Cometas” (Determination of the orbits of comets) be published in the Academy’s memoires. In that work, Monteiro da

This paper deals with Longomontanus’ theory of latitudes of Mars, as it is extant in his Astronomia Danica. I will show how the solution that Longomontanus devised to solve the longitude problems presented by Tycho’s non-bisected model allowed him to achieve very good latitude predictions, without correcting the basic underlying values that were at the root of Tycho’s difficulties regarding latitudes

The Airy Transit Circle of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich is one of the most important instruments in the history of astronomy, navigation and time distribution. However, there has been very little research done on the history of the instrument. This article examines how the purchase of the object glass for the Airy Transit Circle involved active negotiations between George Biddell Airy and three

Second World War and recovery, moving into new realms like radio astronomy, his internationalism, trips abroad, the establishment of a major radio facility in Australia, all interspersed with the growth to maturity of his family. Readers of this journal will probably be familiar with the Springer style. Massive, expensive tomes bound mainly for libraries. Very light copy-editing and too many typos

At the heart of this engaging book is the author’s claim that an emerging transatlantic print culture contributed to a distinct set of disciplinary practices constitutive of the “new astronomy.” Using the public interest around Mars observations between 1860 and 1910, with all its related controversies, Joshua Nall adroitly examines the role of mass media in astronomy’s disciplinary formation at a

Bi-Daily Venus (BDV) is an uncommon event, occurring when an observer can view that planet twice in a single day – in the twilight of dawn and dusk. That William of Conches knew of this phenomenon in twelfth-century France is surprising given the dearth of BDV accounts. Yet following unnamed sources, he discussed BDV in three of his works: Philosophia Mundi, Glosae Super Boetium, and Dragmaticon. From

In 1939, the British Admiralty agreed to move the Royal Observatory from Greenwich to a better site away from London. The removal was postponed due to the Second World War, and the observatory’s re-establishment at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex in the 1940s and 1950s was further delayed by post-war economic difficulties. This paper examines several proposals to remove the observatory that were put

The observatory of Ulugh Beg, erected in Samarqand in the 1420s, represents the culmination in the development of astronomical observatories in the Islamic world. After its rediscovery and excavation in the early twentieth century there have been several attempts to reconstruct its appearance and explain how it worked in detail, based on archaeological finds and the analysis of relevant manuscripts

The State Archives of Belgium, in particular, the archives of Archduke Albert VII of Austria, hold a letter which possibly is a copy of the letter, or an excerpt of the letter, of Kepler to Emperor Rudolf II of October 1604 on SN1604, that is, the first letter of Kepler on the subject. Together with this letter, there are other letters on SN1604, written by Johannes Brengger and Michiel Coignet. In

Drawing on the results of his experiments with vacuum, Otto von Guericke put forward his own theory of comets. He explained this theory in his letters to Stanisław Lubieniecki who later published Guericke’s and his own letters in his Theatrum cometicum (1666–1668). Guericke also wrote about comets in his Experimenta nova (1672), simply reprinting the correspondence from Lubieniecki’s book. All subsequent

After the discovery of the new star of 1572, we find similar phenomena enumerated in the contemporary literature. The earliest of such lists, like that of Riccioli, looked like the cometary historiae of the time. They listed various kinds of objects, which could be put into three classes: mythological, astronomical, and astrological. These compilations were usually gathered from a perusal of the literature

One hundred years ago, J.K. Fotheringham famously derived the “accelerations” of the Sun and Moon from the reports of 11 classical solar eclipses. We review critically the reliability of these eclipse reports and rework his diagrammatic method, treating the deceleration of the Earth’s rotation as an unknown, rather than the “acceleration” of the Sun. There is some serendipity in his choice of the critical

The first determination of the surface temperature of stars other than the Sun is due to the Hungarian astrophysicist Béla Harkányi. Prompted by the recent unprecedented increase in the availability of stellar temperature estimates from Gaia, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Harkányi’s birth, this article presents the life and work of this neglected, yet remarkable figure in the context of

Historians of science have amply demonstrated the transnational character of science; however, they have not sufficiently attended to how several scientific projects were coordinated as part of global initiatives. Our research – based on the unpublished, written correspondence between Christian Ludwig Gerling in Germany and James M. Gilliss in the United States, from 1847 to 1856 – examines the issues

When at the beginning of 1600, Kepler arrived to work with Tycho Brahe, Longomontanus, Tycho’s principal assistant, who was working with a model for Mars that predicted with remarkable accuracy its longitudes at oppositions. According to Kepler, this hypothesis “represented all these oppositions within a distance of two minutes in longitude.” The model, however, was unsuccessful in predicting longitudes

The Liber theoreumacie is a neglected work of practical geometry, written in Strasbourg in 1214, which sheds valuable light on the study and practice of astronomy in early thirteenth-century Europe. In this article, I focus on the first two chapters of Book IV, which both deal with the construction of horary instruments. The first of these chapters contains the earliest known account of the type of

The reports of seven eclipses of the Sun and Moon in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and its Continuation are investigated for their astronomical accuracy using modern-day calculations. The eclipses can all be identified from the given dates, which are accurate to within 2 days, except for one lunar eclipse. There is evidence that the reports were obtained from a range of sources beyond the NE of England

Between 1890 and 1895, five women “computers” were hired to work at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, one of the world’s leading observatories at the time. Caroline Herschel notwithstanding, these women were the very first in Britain to be paid for astronomical observation. They were hired as supernumerary computers – normally a temporary position reserved for young schoolboys. Instead of adhering

This article offers new insights into a series of dramatic events that took place at the imperial Chinese court in December 1668, in which astronomy, politics, and religion all played major roles. Jesuit missionaries had served the Manchu rulers of the Qing 清dynasty as official astronomers since the dynasty seized Beijing in 1644. But in autumn 1664, the Jesuits at court were imprisoned as a result

Ptolemy explicitly claims in the Almagest to have made 36 observations. For most of them, the date of the observation is determined by the kind of phenomenon observed, for example, the observation of a lunar eclipse or of an equinox. There are six observations, however, in which a particular date is not required by the nature of the phenomenon under investigation. In five of them, Ptolemy measures

Isaac ben Solomon Ibn al-Ḥadib (or al-Aḥdab) emigrated from Castile to Sicily no later than 1396. In astronomy, his most important work, written in Hebrew, is The paved way (Oraḥ selula), a set of tables for the motions of the Sun and the Moon. Here, we focus attention on his unusual tables for finding the difference in time and the difference in longitude between mean and true syzygy, where syzygy

The comet 27 P/Crommelin was discovered in 1457 and since then observed six times up to 1956, so its average period is 27.79 years. According to Korean ancient annals, however, comet 27 P/Crommelin was first observed in B.C. 44 and was observed 16 times up to 1457. We traced the records with a period of about 28 years, compiled a list of them and showed that all those records are concerned with the

In 1717, Halley compared contemporaneous measurements of the latitudes of four stars with earlier measurements by ancient Greek astronomers and by Brahe, and from the differences concluded that these four stars showed proper motion. An analysis with modern methods shows that the data used by Halley do not contain significant evidence for proper motion. What Halley found are the measurement errors of

This article introduces various definitions and criteria for the astronomical phenomena of “encroachments” (close lunar and planetary conjunctions) in pre-modern China. With improvements in observations and mathematical astronomy, the standard of encroachments began to undergo many changes leading to more precise explanations of the phenomena. Before the adoption of Huihui Lifa (Islamic-Chinese calendrical

It is often claimed that the 1676 discoveries at the Paris Observatory of a new irregularity in the orbit of Jupiter’s first satellite and of the velocity of light were not due to Rømer alone but that Cassini played a major role or even that Rømer took over these ideas from Cassini. These claims indirectly accuse Rømer and Cassini of dishonesty. We investigate the foundations of these allegations through

This article is devoted to cuneiform sources shedding light on history of Mesopotamian constellations muluz3 (“The Goat”) located in the area of modern Lyra, mul dGula, a goddess connected with muluz3, and mulur.gi7 (“The Dog”) located in Hercules. In the eyes of ancient Mesopotamians, these constellations were bound by complex relationships that were changing in course of time. Gula was the goddess

Using detailed knowledge of the Earth’s variable rotation, we conclude that the eclipse of BC 188 July 17 was total at Rome, and that Livy’s historical account of the darkness that befell the city in that year was due to this eclipse. This sets tight constraints on the value of ∆T at that epoch.

This paper examines John Herschel’s role in establishing nomenclature for the moons of the outer solar system. Prior to the publication of Herschel’s Cape Results in 1847, moons of the solar system were referred to either collectively (e.g. the Medicean stars) or by number. The common narrative is that with the discovery of additional moons around Saturn, this numbering convention became confused,

This paper seeks to show that astronomical tables (zījes) belonging to the tradition of Ibn Isḥāq al-Tunisī (fl. 1193–1222) were available to the astronomers in the service of King Alfonso X (r. 1252–1284), who used them both in their astronomical works written in Castilian and for the production of the Parisian Alfonsine Tables which are, nowadays, extant in Latin.

How have astronomers and physicists responded to the challenge of getting “beyond the atmosphere” in the past century or so, and how did they go about making choices in how they did so? This case study examines a particularly poignant example of how an astronomer’s practice changed in the 1950s when that astronomer, Princeton theoretical astrophysicist Martin Schwarzschild, made a commitment to utilize

It is believed that Vasco da Gama carried nautical tables on his first voyage to the Indies, 1497–1499, that had especially been produced for the years 1497–1500 by Abraham Zacut, then Royal Astronomer in the service of the Portuguese court. Maritime history writers have suggested two manuscripts as surviving copies of these da Gama tables. One of them is a set of declination tables in the 1519 edition

This article attempts to show how an effort was made by Chinese astronomers to improve on the solar model under the auspice of Emperor Kangxi, in circumstances of the merging of Western and Chinese mathematical astronomy. The result of this effort is the Lixiang kaocheng. Different from the eccentric solar model in the previous calendars, Lixiang kaocheng invented a double-epicycle model to describe

Existing research dealing with astronomical observations from medieval Europe have extensively covered topics such as solar and lunar eclipses and sightings of comets and meteors, but no compilation of occultations of planets by the Moon has been carried out and, till now, the data have remained scattered in different publications. The main reasons for this are the small number of observations that

An undated medieval Latin astrolabe in the British Museum has many of the design features shown in manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe and is thus one of a group of astrolabes often described as “Chaucerian.” Although traditionally dated to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, it has recently been suggested that it is a later copy made by using the Treatise illustrations

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the meridian passing though the Royal Observatory at Greenwich had become a near-universal reference for place and time. It was the zero of longitude. But our current standard of zero longitude is about 100 metres away from the original. That mobility needs historical context: Greenwich began to move in the years after the First World War, when wireless techniques

Johannes Kepler described the Copernican universe as consisting of a central, small, brilliant sun with its planetary system, all surrounded by giant stars. These stars were far larger than, and much dimmer than, the sun – his De Stella Nova shows that every visible star must exceed the size of the Earth’s orbit, and the most prominent stars may exceed the size of the entire planetary system. His other

In this paper, we analyse and compare two sets of tables in the framework of Alfonsine astronomy composed by John of Lignères and his disciple, John of Saxony, respectively, both belonging to the first generation of scholars using the Alfonsine tables in Paris in the early fourteenth century. John of Lignères’s almanac is limited to the five planets, whereas the similar work by John of Saxony deals

We investigate the date of observation of the Hipparchus eclipse using our latest measurement of historical variations in the Earth’s rotation to plot the tracks of the potential eclipses. We conclude that Hipparchus most probably analysed the eclipse of −189 in deriving the distance to the Moon, as concluded by Toomer in 1974.

The orbital elements of each planet are the eccentricity and the direction of the apsidal line of its orbit defined by the ecliptic longitude of either of its apses, i.e., the two points on its orbit where the planet is either furthest from or closest to the Earth, which are called the planet’s apogee and perigee. In the geocentric view of the solar system, the eccentricity of Venus is a bit less than

In this paper, I publish and analyse a compilation of observations of the synodic phenomena of Saturn from Babylon, which can be dated to the early sixth century b.c. By comparing these observations with records found in other early compilations of planetary observations it is possible to trace the development of observational practice in Babylonia. The compilation contains references to several stars

In 1614 the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner and his student, Johann Georg Locher, proposed a physical mechanism to explain how the Earth could orbit the sun. An orbit, they said, is a perpetual fall. They proposed this despite the fact that they rejected the Copernican system, citing problems with falling bodies and the sizes of stars under that system. In 1651 and again in 1680, Jesuit writers

An analysis of the tracks of total and annular solar eclipses crossing China reveals that most of the reports of such eclipses in the treatises in the dynastic histories from 206 bc to ad 1368 were very probably recorded at the capital by the court astronomers. Some of the reports in the annals, on the other hand, could only have been based on observation if they originated from outside the capital

The Sovereign Pole System (Huang ji li 皇極曆, a.d. 600) is the first Chinese astronomical system to include a solar equation table for calculating the motion of the Sun. From then on, each Chinese system took the solar equation of centre into consideration. Some scholars have argued that Chinese solar theory in the Sui and Tang dynasties was developed independently by Chinese astronomers. However, other