Related papers: Francesco Fontana and his "astronomical" Telescope
In the last few years it has been alleged the possible identification of the sitter in Jusepe de Ribera's Allegory of Sight with the Neapolitan optician Francesco Fontana (c. 1585-1656), known for contributing to the diffusion of the…
G. B. Riccioli's 1651 Almagestum Novum contains a table of diameters of stars measured by Riccioli and his associates with a telescope. These telescopically measured star diameters are spurious, caused by the diffraction of light waves…
During the voyages that led him to discover the new continent bearing his name, Amerigo Vespucci made interesting astronomical observations of the southern sky. In the past, his data have been interpreted with criteria that do not follow…
The page written by the astronomer Francesco Bianchini (1662-1729) and containing the data of the 1701 winter solstice observed at Santa Maria degli Angeli is presented for the first time in figure 2 and widely discussed along this paper.…
While Kepler was still working in Graz during 1598, some letters to his mentor Michael Maestlin demonstrate his interest in astronomical clocks and machines. The first letter, dated January 6, 1598 contains a detailed description of a…
The first idea of establishing a public astronomical observatory in Florence, Capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, dates to the mid of the 18th century. Initially, the use of a low building on a high ground was proposed, and the hill of…
The great meridian line in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome was built in 1701/1702 with the scope of measuring the obliquity of the Earth's orbit in the following eight centuries, upon the will of Pope Clement XI. During the…
What are the historical evidence concerning the turning of the spyglass into an astronomical instrument, the telescope? In Sidereus Nuncius and in his private correspondence Galileo tells the reader what he did with the telescope, but he…
Mars has surely been scrutinised since the dawn of humankind. In the 16th century Tycho Brahe made accurate observations of the position of Mars that enabled Johannes Kepler to obtain his first two laws of planetary motion. In the 17th…
This is a historian's view of how modern astronomy data can be used to discuss the shifting historical worldview of Late Antiquity. In this article an attemp is made to construct an approximate model of how the cycles of astronomical…
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…
The Copernican Principle (which says the Earth and sun are not unique) should have observational consequences and thus be testable. Galileo Galilei thought he could measure the true angular diameters of stars with his telescope; according…
Bruno Rossi is considered one of the fathers of modern physics, being also a pioneer in virtually every aspect of what is today called high-energy astrophysics. At the beginning of 1930s he was the pioneer of cosmic ray research in Italy,…
The scientific revolution in the first half of the seventeenth century, pioneered by figures such as Harvey, Galileo, Gassendi, Kepler and Descartes, was disseminated to the northernmost countries in Europe with considerable delay. In this…
Plutarchus, circa 100 AD, in his early book on "astrophysics" --in which he exposed, in a sense, a general theory of gravitation-- wrote the noticeable passage: <<The Moon gets the guarantee of not falling down just from its motion and from…
Albert Einstein postulated the equivalence of energy and mass, developed the theory of special relativity, explained the photoelectric effect, and described Brownian motion in five papers, all published in 1905, 100 years ago. With these…
Nowadays, astronomers want to observe gaps in exozodiacal disks to confirm the presence of exoplanets, or even make actual images of these companions. Four hundred and fifty years ago, Jean-Dominique Cassini did a similar study on a closer…
Probably, the long-term monitoring of the solar atmosphere started in Italy with the first telescopic observations of the Sun made by Galileo Galilei in the early $17^{\mathrm{th}}$ century. His recorded observations and science results, as…
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…
Neptune was telescopically discovered by Johan Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d'Arrest in Berlin on 23 September 1846 based on the prediction by Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier. The role German astronomers played in the discovery has…