Related papers: Thinking about Archeoastronomy
The study explored the usage of astronomical observations for the identification and tracking of artificial satellites. Spacecraft streaks on astronomical images are a growing issue for the astronomical community. The increasing number of…
The obscuration of a celestial body that covers another one in the background will be called a ``hierarchical eclipse''. The most obvious case is that a star or a planet will be hidden from sight by the moon during a lunar eclipse. Four…
It is widely believed that the advance of science in the Islamic world after the mid-fifteenth century A.D. suffered a decline. For the purpose of examining this belief, a manuscript by Qasim ali al-Qayini (ca. A.D.1685) was chosen based on…
In this contribution we briefly review some of the current issues and promises for the future by asteroseismology. We are entering a new phase in this field driven by the wealth of data that has been collected and data that will soon be…
Much of the progress in Astronomy has been driven by instrumental developments, from the first telescopes to fiber fed spectrographs. In this review we describe the field of astrophotonics, a combination of photonics and astronomical…
The last two decades have brought spectacular advances in astrophysics of cosmic rays (CRs) and space- and ground-based astronomy. Launches of missions that employ forefront detector technologies enabled measurements with large effective…
We discuss the extent to which the visibility of the heavens was a necessary condition for the development of science, with particular reference to the measurement of time. Our conclusion is that while astronomy had significant importance,…
I summarize the excitement of my role primarily in the early years of X-ray Astronomy. As a "second-generation" X-ray astronomer, I was privileged to participate in the enormous advance of the field, both technically and astrophysically,…
The use of the observed positions of celestial bodies to determine the location of a navigator and to direct vessels, was an aspiration of ancient seafarers. Various peoples, in the Mediterranean as much as in the Indian Ocean, in China as…
From al-Sufi's tenth-century observation of the Andromeda Galaxy as a "little cloud" to contemporary space missions, Islamic astronomy represents a millennium-spanning tradition of innovation and knowledge. This study traces its trajectory…
Thanks to their usefulness in various fields of astrophysics (e.g. mixing processes in stars, chemical evolution of galaxies), the last few years have witnessed a large increase in the amount of abundance data for early-type stars. Two…
For many decades scholars converse how to correctly include the Old Babylonian Empire into the absolute timeline of history. A cuneiform text from the series Enuma Anu Enlil (EAE #20) reports on the destruction of Babylon after a lunar and…
Progress in astronomy comes from interpreting the signals encoded in the light received from distant objects: the distribution of light over the sky (images), over photon wavelength (spectrum), over polarization angle, and over time…
Most scientific data will never be directly examined by scientists; rather it will be put into online databases where it will be analyzed and summarized by computer programs. Scientists increasingly see their instruments through online…
Astronomy is an observationally-led subject where chance discoveries play an important role. A whole range of such discoveries is continually made, from the trivial to the highly significant. What is generally needed is for luck to strike…
This article is a second analysis step from the descriptive arXiv:2001.10952 preprint. This work is aimed to arise awareness to the scientific astronomical community about the negative impact of satellites' mega-constellations and put in…
Astronomy is at a turning point in its history and in its relations with the Indigenous peoples who are the generational stewards of land where several of our main observatories are located. The controversy regarding the further development…
Astronomy has played a major part in the development of civilisations, not only through conceptual developments, but most importantly through the very practical gains obtained through the observation of Sun, Moon planets and stars. Space…
This is the written version of an invited review talk for the 13 Feb 2004 AAAS Meeting in Seattle. The talk's goal is to present a philosophical view of extragalactic astronomy as it applies to the sub-field of galaxy evolution. The talk is…
Intersection with the debris of a large (50-100 km) short-period comet during the Upper Palaeolithic provides a satisfactory explanation for the catastrophe of celestial origin which has been postulated to have occurred around 12900 BP, and…