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History and AstronomyGlenn Holliday
Rappahannock Astronomy ClubNight in Washington's Day at Kenmore
November 13 2015
Credit: NASA
Credit: Musée des Antiquités Nationales at St-Germain-en-Laye
37,000 years old (Old Stone Age).It's easy to assume people have been naming the stars – astronomy – for as long as there have been people.
People = Astronomy
25,000 years old (Old Stone Age).
Both may have non-astronomical interpretations.
Credit: Science Museum of Brussels
13,000 years old (Middle Stone Age), France.People have put the stars into art as long as they have made art.
Art = Astronomy
6,000 years old (New Stone Age), Scotland.
Credit: Wikicommons
England Plough
Germany Wagon
Burma Crab
Finland Net
India 7 Sages
China Dipper
Great Lakes Rotating Man
Greece Bear
Western America
Bear
Stories = Astronomy
Cultures across 20,000 years have the same story about hunters chasing a bear. It may have traveled with migrants from Siberia to America.
The Pleiades have a similar ancient legacy. Both Europe and America have the same story about 7 people who go up into the sky and become stars.
Credit: Wikicommons
Credit: British Museum
4000 years old (Bronze Age), Babylon.
Babylon → Egypt → Greece → Arabia → Europe
India → China → Arabia → Europe
South America → Central America → North America
Australia → Pacific
Writing = Astronomy
From Rome: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn
From Arabia: Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, Altair
5,000 years old (New Stone Age) Calendars
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Math = Astronomy
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
4,000 years old (Bronze Age) Navigation
3,000 years old (Bronze Age) Geometry
2,500 years old (Iron Age) Trigonometry
Math = Astronomy
Credit: American Association for the Advancement of Science
2,300 years old (Babylon) Pre-Calculus
This tablet was collected a century ago.
In 2015 it was translated, studied, and found to contain Kepler's Second Law of Planetary Motion.
(A planet sweeps across equal areas under its orbit in equal amounts of time.)
The tablet uses geometry to compute and predict the positions of Jupiter, starting with any date on which the planet first becomes visible on the horizon.
It divides a polygon repeatedly to approach the limit of the curve of the planet's orbit.
This was not known again until the 1600s.
2,700 years old (Iron Age), Nimrud (Assyria)
Oldest lens known
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Technology = Astronomy
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
1609 Galileo's second telescope, copied from earlier Dutch telescopes
Credit: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences,
1543: Copernicus: you can explain the movements you see better if the Earth goes around the sun rather than the other way round
The Renaissance = Astronomy
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Galileo observed the first direct physical evidence that Copernicus was right.Galileo publicized enthusiastically.Our first modern science writer.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Supernovas Support the New Astronomy
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Greek model: Stars are unchanging.
Disproved by two new stars:
Tycho's Star 1572. As bright as Venus (mag -4), visible in daytime. Visible for 11 months. 8,000 light years away.
Kepler's Star 1607. Brighter than any star (mag -2). Visible in daytime for 3 weeks, at night for 18 months, though 20,000 light years away.
Extremely unusual to have two visible supernovae in 35 years.
There has not been another this bright since these two.
America = Astronomy
1690s David Rittenhouse, America's first telescope maker.
Thomas Jefferson's plan for the astronomical observatory at the University of Virginia.
1636 Harvard founded. Its astronomy course causes America's first student protest.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Citizen = Astronomy
Three bright comets in 1664, 1680, and 1682 fueled the public imagination, the publication of almanacs, and astrology in America.
Every gentleman of the Enlightenment was an amateur scientist. This is one of 15 telescopes George Washington owned.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Credit: Mount Vernon
The legacy of this Enlightenment value is our modern citizen science. Amateurs sometimes do science when professionals can't.
Accelerating Centuries of Acceleration
1781 Herschel discovers Uranus.Revolutionary: First new planet since ancients.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
1841: Galle discoveres Neptune, where theory predicted it would be.The man who discovered a planet with the point of his pen.
Credit: NASA1800s Messier catalogs objects outside our solar system.He doesn't know that's where they are.
Credit: NASA
Recent History
1800s Spectroscopy gives a new way to gather new kinds of information about stars.Helium discovered first on Sun, later on Earth.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
From 1920s: Rocketry gives birth to space flight, which makes new tools for astronomy
1930s Edwin Hubble discovers some faint fuzzies are outside our own galaxy. Credit: NASA
Credit: NASA
Exoplanets – Today's New Science
Credit: Keck Observatory
The first direct image of a protoplanet (blue) sweeping up material (red) from its surrounding protoplanetary disk.
Astronomy on Other Planets
Curiosity, on Mars, took this picture of Earth in the Martian sky
Credit: NASA
Credit: NASA
Future = Astronomy
The next telescope to go to spaceThe James Webb Space TelescopeThe one after that? Maybe on the Moon
Credit: NASA