Related papers: Boscovich and the Brera Observatory
The 1703 was the first year of full operation of the meridian line in the Basilica of St. Maria degli Angeli in Rome. The instants of solstices and equinoxes, the \textit{Anni Cardines}, obtained by comparing transit timings of Sun and…
Galileo's support to the Copernican theory was decisive for the revolutionary astronomical discoveries he achieved in 1610. We trace the origins of Galileo's conversion to the Copernican theory, discussing in particular the "Dialogo de…
OPERA is a long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment designed to observe $\nu_{\mu} \to \nu_{\tau}$ oscillations by looking at the appearance of $\nu_{\tau}$'s in an almost pure $\nu_\mu$ beam. The beam is produced at CERN and sent…
The Jesuit missions in South America were an important and unique advance in Christian evangelisation on the continent until the expulsion of the Order in 1767. Although the history and cultural aspects of these missions and their most…
Several early spyglasses are depicted in five paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder completed between 1608 and 1625, as he was court painter of Archduke Albert VII of Habsburg. An optical tube that appears in the Extensive Landscape with View…
This paper is proposing some physics problems from a book, De Motu Gravium Naturaliter Descendentium, written by Evangelista Torricelli, with the aim of showing how physics was taught in a university, that of Pisa, in the 17th century.
In May 1982, when Italy joined ESO, only two isolated neutron stars (INSs) had been identified in the optical: the Crab and Vela pulsars. Thanks to the ESO telescopes and the perseverance of a few Italian astronomers, now about 30 INSs have…
The objective reality of the Earth's motion about the Sun was finally proven observationally by Bradley (1727) when he correctly explained the ~20'' annual, elliptical motions of stars as being due to aberration of starlight caused by the…
Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, long-haul oceanic voyages of exploration and discovery routinely carried astronomical tent observatories to support land-based longitude determinations using heavy and cumbersome…
Margherita Hack observed with the Galileo telescope at the Asiago Astrophysical Observatory from September 1951 to March 1954. Using the spectroscopic facilities of the observatory, Margherita contributed to the stellar study of novae,…
We present the archive of the wide-field plate observations obtained at the University Observatory Jena, which is stored at the Astrophysical Institute of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. The archive contains plates taken in the…
The Bianchi I metric describes a homogeneous, but anisotropic universe and is commonly used to fit cosmological data. A fit to the angular distribution of 740 supernovae of type Ia with measured redshift and apparent luminosity is…
This paper is dedicated to the discovery of one of the most important relationships in supernova cosmology - the relation between the peak luminosity of Type Ia supernovae and their luminosity decline rate after maximum light. The history…
We consider the attitude of astronomers in Argentina in connection with the new problems posed by relativity theory, before and after GR was presented. We begin considering the sequence of "technical" publications that appeared and use it…
The dome of Saint Peter's Basilica plays the role of the Moon during a stellar occultation and Arcturus is the target star. This occultation-like phenomenon is useful for introducing to occultation astronomy a class of student up to…
Many have have taken in hand to write a treatise on the Star of Bethlehem, particularly on Kepler's explanation as a stellar birth, triggered by Mars joining a great conjunction (a meeting of Jupiter and Saturn), as he observed it in…
The Hubble law, widely considered the first observational basis for the expansion of the universe, may in the future be known as the Hubble-Lema\^itre law. This is what the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union…
We describe a balance weight dated to the Early Islamic Period from the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa (Israel) Its polyhedral shape was attributed to a truncated elongated octagonal bipyramid. To our knowledge, the earliest…
Observational cosmology of the first decades of the Twentieth Century was dominated by two giants: Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley. Hubble's major contributions were to the study and classification of individual galaxies with large…
In 1847 Christian Ludwig Gerling, Marburg (Germany), suggested the solar parallax to be determined by measuring the position of Venus close to its inferior conjunction, especially at the stationary points, from observatories on nearly the…