Related papers: Willem Janszoon Blaeu
During the summer of 1837 Christian Ludwig Gerling, a former student of Carl Friedrich Gau{\ss}'s, organized the world wide first determination of the deflection of the vertical in longitude. From a mobile observatory at the Frauenberg near…
Four hundred years after its publication, Galileo's masterpiece Sidereus Nuncius is still a mine of useful information for historians of science and astronomy. In his short book Galileo reports a large amount of data that, despite its age,…
T. H. Astbury (1858-1922) was for many years the much-respected headmaster of a boys' junior school in the English market town of Wallingford. By night he was a dedicated amateur astronomer who enjoyed observing meteors, variable stars and…
The Sun has been observed through a telescope for four centuries. However, its study made a prodigious leap at the end of the nineteenth century with the appearance of photography and spectroscopy, then at the beginning of the following…
The spectroheliograph was invented independently by Henri Deslandres (France) and George Hale (USA) in 1892, following the spectroscopic method suggested by Jules Janssen in 1869. This instrument is dedicated to the production of…
Henri Camichel was an astronomer at Pic du Midi Observatory, where he contributed to the study of planets of the solar system and their satellites with Audouin Dollfus and his team. In 1961, with Charles Boyer, he found that the upper…
Nicolas-Auguste Tissot (1824--1897) was a French mathematician and cartographer. He introduced a tool which became known among geographers under the name ``Tissot indicatrix'', and which was widely used during the first half of the…
The Mulhouse mathematician Jean-Henri (or Johann Heinrich) Lambert (August 26 or 28, 1728; September 25, 1777) is well known for having devised the conformal conic projection in 1772, which is still used in some graphical outputs of our…
On February 23 1987 a supernova (exploding star) was observed in the Large Cloud of Magellan, the brightest supernova in 400 years. It spurred the commencement of collaborative research in astrophysics between Japan and New Zealand that is…
Jean Deshayes, a teacher of mathematics in his native France, single-handedly put Qu\'ebec on the map, literally. An accomplished astronomer, he used the lunar eclipse of 10--11 December 1685 to determine the settlement's longitude to…
Nicolas-Auguste Tissot (1824--1897) published a series of papers on cartography in which he introduced a tool which became known later on, among geographers, under the name of the "Tissot indicatrix." This tool was broadly used during the…
When V. M. Slipher gave the 1933 George Darwin lecture to the Royal Astronomical Society, it was natural that he spoke on spectrographic studies of planets. Less than one-sixth of his published work deals with globular clusters and the…
Whilst astronomy as a science is historically founded on observations at optical wavelengths, studying the Universe in other bands has yielded remarkable discoveries, from pulsars in the radio, signatures of the Big Bang at submm…
We provide a brief biography of seven French astronomers and physicists and of a Russian astronomer from the 19th and 20th centuries. Roger Bouigue (1920-) was the director of Toulouse Observatory in the 1960s. Claude-Louis Mathieu…
In 1785 astronomer William Herschel mapped out the shape of the Milky Way star system using measurements he called "star-gages." Herschel's star-gage method is described in detail, with particular attention given to the assumptions on which…
John Goodricke and Edward Pigott, working in York, England, between 1781 and 1786, determined the periods of variation of eclipsing binaries such as Algol and Beta Lyrae and speculated that the eclipses of Algol might be caused by a "dark…
Tycho Brahe, the most prominent and accomplished astronomer of his era, made measurements of the apparent sizes of the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets. From these he showed that within a geocentric cosmos these bodies were of comparable…
This paper was written as part of a book entitled: "Questions of Modern Cosmology - Galileo's Legacy" which is a celebrative book dedicated to Galileo Galilei. The book is published in 2009, the International Year of Astronomy, since it is…
Although not laying claim to being the inventor of the light microscope, Antonj van Leeuwenhoek, (1632-1723) was arguably the first person to bring this new technological wonder of the age properly to the attention of natural scientists…
W. N. ('Chris') Christiansen was an innovative and influential radio astronomy pioneer. The hallmarks of his long and distinguished career in science and engineering, spanning almost five decades, were his inventiveness and his commitment…