Related papers: The Astronomy of Aboriginal Australia
Mathematics curriculums at most universities tend to perpetuate a belief that higher mathematics is historically and culturally European. First Nations and minority students may not see their identities and cultures reflected in the…
The possible discovery of astronomical effects due to precession - such as the shift in the declination of heliacal raising of bright stars or the precession of the equinoxes - is reviewed for various ancient cultures in the world. Although…
The Mayan culture collected exquisite astronomical data for over a millennium. However, it failed to come up with the breakthrough ideas of modern astronomy because the data was analyzed within a mythological culture of astrology that…
We discuss the songlines and navigation of the Wardaman people, and place them in context by comparing them with corresponding practices in other Australian Aboriginal language groups, using previously unpublished information and also…
Recently, a widely publicized claim has been made that the Aboriginal Australians discovered the variability of the red star Betelgeuse in the modern Orion, plus the variability of two other prominent red stars: Aldebaran and Antares. This…
The indigenous astronomy in Africa and of Africans exhibits many of the same patterns as indigenous astronomy found in other parts of the world such as with agricultural calendars established by observing celestial bodies as well as other…
This paper describes some of the astronomical effects that could be important for understanding the ice ages, historic climate changes and the recent temperature increase. These include changes in the sun's luminosity, periodic changes in…
Meteorites are a remarkable resource. They capture the imagination of people worldwide with their spectacular entry through Earth's atmosphere as fireballs, and their exotic character of being pieces of other worlds. Scientifically, they…
The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years…
Observational astrophysics uses sophisticated technology to collect and measure electromagnetic and other radiation from beyond the Earth. Modern observatories produce large, complex datasets and extracting the maximum possible information…
Multi-messenger astronomy provides for the observation of the same astronomical event with different kind of telescopes at the same time: optical observations, X-rays, gamma-ray bursts, neutrinos and, most recently, gravitational waves are…
Astronomical observations were used as a marker for time and the Calendar from ancient times. A more subtle calibration of epochs is thrown up by an observation of the position of the solstices and equinoxes, because these points shift in…
Light pollution is actively destroying our ability to see the stars. Many Indigenous traditions and knowledge systems around the world are based on the stars, and the peoples' ability to observe and interpret stellar positions and…
Astronomical and cosmological knowledge up to the dawn of modern science was profoundly embedded in myth, religion and superstition. Many of these inventions of the human mind remain today stored in different supports: medieval engravings,…
Two decades ago, astronomers began detecting planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, so-called exoplanets. Since that time, the rate of detections and the sensitivity to ever-smaller planets has improved dramatically with several…
In the distant past, astronomy was often intertwined with religion into a unified cosmos. As science became a distinct cultural enterprise, astronomy has witnessed a variety of rich interactions with other fields. Mathematical statistics…
The new astronomical technique of gravitational microlensing enables measurements of high precision to be made in certain circumstances. Useful advances have been made in the fields of galactic astronomy, stellar astronomy and planetary…
Perhaps more than other physical sciences, astronomy is frequently statistical in nature. The objects under study are inaccessible to direct manipulation in the laboratory, so the astronomer is restricted to observing a few external…
Cultural Astronomy sits at the intersection of our study of the universe and the human experience, exploring how we observe the stars, interpret their motions, and incorporate them into our perspectives of the nature of reality. "Astronomy…
We present an exploratory study of the perception of professional astronomers about the societal impact of astronomy. Ten semi-structured interviews with astronomers from a range of career and cultural backgrounds have been conducted to…