Tag Archives: history of astronomy

ⓜ Neptune’s First Birthday

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This entry is part 6 of 47 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… in 2011, the planet Neptune had completed one full orbit around the Sun from the time when it was first discovered, and a small magazine called Argentus, edited by a friend of mine, Steve Silver, invited a number of astronomers to submit articles in its honor. You can see the resulting special issue here, on line. My contribution was to conduct an interview with Dr. Heidi Hammel, who is one of the world’s leading experts on the outer planets… and someone I have known since we were at MIT together, a… few… years ago. Here’s the interview: Planet Neptune was discovered on September 23, 1846, by the Berlin Observatory astronomers Johann Galle and Heinrich D’Arrest. They had famously been informed by the French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier that calculations of the perturbations in the orbit of Uranus suggested a planet could be found in a particular spot of the sky; when Galle and D’Arrest pointed their … Continue reading →

ⓜ Other Worlds, Other Civilizations?

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This entry is part 29 of 47 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… Finishing up my string of articles for the International Year of Astronomy, this paper was one that I never got to give. I was supposed to fly from London to Italy for a conference on the celebration of Galileo’s telescope, to be held in his old home town of Padua, but the day my flight was scheduled to leave Gatwick the airport was shut down due to snow! The amount of snow would have been nothing in Chicago, but for London it constituted a major blizzard… It was finally published in the proceedings conference proceedings, Galileo’s Medicean Moons: their impact on 400 years of discovery As so many of the presentations at this conference have confirmed, Galileo’s discoveries with the telescope, epitomized by his discovery of satellites orbiting Jupiter, revolutionized astronomy. They also revolutionized our view of the universe, what has been come to be called our scientific “cosmology.” And in the process, they gave a new … Continue reading →

Specola Guestbook: May 18, 1910 – Oskar Backlund

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This entry is part 15 of 70 in the series Specola Guestbook

Since its founding in 1891, many people have passed through the doors of the Vatican Observatory.  A quick perusal of our guestbook reveals several Names, including Popes, nobel laureates, astronauts, actors, and saints. Today’s guestbook entry is from May 18, 1910, when Oskar Backlund made a visit. Next to his name, Johan Oskar Backlund FRS (1846-1918) — known in Russia as Oskar Andreevich Backlund — wrote simply, “Pulkova.” Originally Swedish, Backlund moved to Russia in 1876. He worked at the Polkovo Observatory, becoming its director in 1895. His primary astronomical work was developing a very precise orbit for the comet Encke, including the effect of perturbations from planets and other significant objects. From this, he also attempted to estimate the masses of those objects; particularly Mercury. Other work included geodetic measurements of Spitzbergen at the end of the 19th century. The asteroid 856 Backlunda, the lunar crater Backlund, and the terrestrial mountain Backlundtoppen (near Spitzbergen) all are named for him. … Continue reading →

Specola Guestbook: September 7, 1967 – Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge

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This entry is part 11 of 70 in the series Specola Guestbook

Since its founding in 1891, many people have passed through the doors of the Vatican Observatory.  A quick perusal of our guestbook reveals several Names, including Popes, nobel laureates, astronauts, actors, and saints. For today’s guestbook entry, we jump out of sequence once again to September 7, 1967, when Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge made a visit. They came with their daughter Sarah. Next to their names is written, “La Jolla, California.” Later, they signed the guestbook again in 1970 during a meeting on galactic nuclei at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. There is a timely reason to highlight these guests of the Specola this week. On Monday, August 12, 2019, Margaret Burbidge celebrates her 100th birthday. Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, along with collaborators William Fowler and Fred Hoyle, are most known for developing the theory of the nucleosynthetic origin of elements in stars. This ground-breaking theory was published in a 100-page journal article in 1957. This paper is referred to … Continue reading →

A note on the date of Easter

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This entry is part 28 of 62 in the series Diary

Horst Rademacher,  a seismologist at U C Berkeley, wrote to friends of mine there last weekend, asking about the date of Easter: May I bother you with a question, which is probably trivial for astronomers like you to answer. However neither Peggy nor I could find an answer anywhere. Here is the question: Tomorrow (Apr 1) is Easter. According to the classic definition Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. That makes sense, because today is full moon, which is the first full moon after the beginning of spring. And tomorrow is Sunday, hence Easter. However, today’s full moon occurred at 5:37 am PDT. Let’s assume, the full moon would have occurred at 5:37 pm PDT. Applying the definition above from a purely California perspective, tomorrow would still be Easter. However, if we were in the Netherlands, in Germany or in the Vatican for that matter, this assumed full moon would … Continue reading →

Guest posting: David Levy’s Skyward, December 2017

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This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Guest Column

Our friend David Levy was the guest speaker at the annual Vatican Observatory Foundation annual public astronomy seminar, held last October in Ann Arbor. He writes a monthly astronomy column, Skyward, and has graciously given us permission to run it here as well. Here’s his December column: Last month I visited the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to give a lecture. The experience was fun and intellectually enlighting. Just before the lecture I had a good chat with University President Dr. Jem Spectar during which he mentioned the name of Zechario Sitchin, a philosopher who has made some curious predictions relating to astronomy. I decided that Sitchin was worth following up, not because he predicted that some unknown planet might come barging in on Earth someday, but because he was a student of some ancient Mesopotamian astronomy. Mesopotamia was a large area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, now a part of Iran. Their astronomy dates back some three … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: A Thousand Stars are Born

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This entry is part 123 of 191 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in May 2013 Cygnus OB2 is an association of perhaps a thousand young, massive stars, some of them a hundred times more massive than the Sun and a million times brighter, immersed in a much larger molecular cloud known as Cygnus X. Because it is so close to us (“only” 4700 light years away) we can study Cygnus OB2 in detail, comparing model predictions about the formation of such massive stars with actual observations. These studies might help us understand how such stars are born not only in our galaxy but also in more distant galaxies. But that mass of data can overwhelm our understanding. It’s impossible for any one astronomer to keep track of all the latest developments. And so in May, 2013, we held a workshop at the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo where two dozen scientists could compare notes about this star formation region. “This is a meeting of the blind … Continue reading →