Related papers: William Dawes: Practical Astronomy on the "First F…

Voyages of exploration often included astronomers among their crew to aid with maritime navigation. William Dawes, a British Marine who had been trained in practical astronomy, was assigned to the "First Fleet", a convoy of eleven ships…

The voyage of the "First Fleet" from Britain to the new colony of New South Wales was not only a military enterprise, it also had a distinct scientific purpose. Britain's fifth Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, had selected William Dawes,…

This paper was given to mark the centenary of the death of David Gill, the foremost British astronomer in the last quarter of the 19th century and into the 20th century. Gill abandoned a successful career as a clock and watchmaker. His…

The students are introduced to navigation in general and the longitude problem in particular. A few videos provide insight into scientific and historical facts related to the issue. Then, the students learn in two steps how longitude can be…

Over two hundred years ago Capt. James Cook sailed up Whitsunday Passage, just a few miles where we now sit, on a voyage of astronomical observation and discovery that remains an inspiration to us all. Since the prospects of our visiting…

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…

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…

Astronomers are the surveyors of the sky. They have always dedicated much time and resources to determining the scale of distances in the universe. Today, the Hubble constant; yesterday, the solar parallar. The following account, attributed…

Between the 4th and 6th of September 2024, the Astronomy & Astrophysics group at the University of Warwick held a meeting to celebrate 21 years of astronomy at Warwick and the scientific legacy of the late Prof. Tom Marsh, the group…

The late-sixteenth century witnessed a major expansion of Dutch shipping activity from northern European waters to the Indian Ocean and beyond. At a time when the Renaissance had just arrived on the North Sea's shores, scientist-scholars,…

In the nearly 60 years of spaceflight we have accomplished wonderful feats of exploration that have shown the incredible spirit of the human drive to explore and understand our universe. Yet in those 60 years we have barely left our solar…

In 1755 Thomas Bayes expressed an interest in the problem of combining repeated measurements of the location of a star. Bayes described a tandem set-up of a ball thrown on a table, followed by repeated throws of a second ball. Bayes' table…

The traditional cultures of Aboriginal Australians include a significant astronomical component, perpetuated through oral tradition, ceremony, and art. This astronomical knowledge includes a deep understanding of the motion of objects in…

In 1492, for the first time, an unknown ocean opened up before sailors: weeks of navigation and no idea how to pinpoint their location. Since ancient times, navigators had known how to determine latitude by using the North Star, but the…

The closest ever fly-by of the Martian moon Phobos, performed by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, gives a unique opportunity to sharpen and test the Planetary Radio Interferometry and Doppler Experiments (PRIDE)…

October 1957, and the successful launch of Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit, marked the dawn of the Space Age. The first of the 'fellow travellers' - humanity's first artificial satellite - orbited for a mere three months before re-entering the…

We report follow-up observations of transiting exoplanets that have either large uncertainties (>10 minutes) in their transit times or have not been observed for over three years. A fully robotic ground-based telescope network, observations…

For millenia, sailors have used the empirical rule that the elevation angle of Polaris, the North Star, as measured by sextant, quadrant or astrolabe, is approximately equal to latitude. Here, we show using elementary trigonometry that…

The Columbia Scientific Ballooning Facility operates stratospheric balloon flights out of McMurdo Station in Antarctica. We use balloon trajectory data from 40 flights between 1991 and 2016 to give the first quantification of trajectory…

Following Columbus' voyages to the Americas, Castilian (Spanish) and Portuguese rulers engaged in heated geopolitical competition, which was eventually reconciled through a number of treaties that divided the world into two unequal…