Related papers: Where was Mean Solar Time first adopted?
As the use of solar power increases, having accurate and timely forecasts will be essential for smooth grid operators. There are many proposed methods for forecasting solar irradiance / solar power production. However, many of these methods…
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…
The radiation pressure exerted by incoherent light on diverse surfaces is examined. The thermodynamic rule, first given by Carnot in 1824, describes the limitation to the amount of free energy that can be obtained from a source of thermal…
We present analog clocks fitted to the Mars solar day. These clocks use the standard Earth-based second of the International System of Units (SI) as their operational unit of time, unlike current practice for Mars timekeeping. We discuss…
Among the first devices used to measure the time we find the sundials and the water-clocks, as told by Vitruvius in his book on the Architecture. The sundials work because of the shadows cast by a rod or pole, the gnomon, on their…
The recently published Yemeni observing report about SN 1006 from al-Yamani clearly gives AD 1006 Apr $17 \pm 2$ (mid-Rajab 396h) as first observation date. Since this is about 1.5 weeks earlier than the otherwise earliest reports (Apr 28…
During the years 2009 to 2011, neutrino beams were fired repeatedly from CERN towards a detector in Italy's Gran Sasso tunnel, some 4 deg south and 7 deg east of CERN, at a distance of 730.5 km, in the shape of short bunches of particles.…
Urban heat islands, defined as specific zones exhibiting substantially higher temperatures than their immediate environs, pose significant threats to environmental sustainability and public health. This study introduces a novel…
Timings of human activities are marked by circadian clocks which in turn are entrained to different environmental signals. In an urban environment the presence of artificial lighting and various social cues tend to disrupt the natural…
Aims. To determine the solar transition region and coronal radius at EUV wavelengths and its time evolution during Solar Cycle XXIII. Methods. We use daily 30.4 and 17.1 nm images obtained by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EIT) aboard the…
Sunspots have been known in the West since Galileo Galilei and Thomas Harriot first used telescopes to observe the Sun nearly four centuries ago; they have been known to the Chinese for more than two thousand years. They appear as…
Specola Solare Ticinese is an observatory dedicated to Sunspot Number counting, which was constructed in 1957 in Locarno, Southern Switzerland, as an external observing station of the Zurich Federal Observatory. When in 1981 the…
Late in October 1911, eighteen leading scientists from all over Europe met to the first of a famous sequence of Solvay conferences in Brussels. This historical meeting was mainly devoted to "The Theory of Radiation and the Quanta", at a…
Between 1761 and 1776, Christian Horrebow made regular observations of sunspots from Rundetaarn in Copenhagen. Based on these observations he writes in 1775 that "it appears that after the course of a certain number of years, the appearance…
We analyze global surface temperature data obtained at 13472 weather stations from the year 1702 to 1990. The mean annual temperature of a station fluctuates from year to year by typically +-0.6oC (one standard deviation). Superimposed on…
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…
The Maunder Minimum corresponds to a prolonged minimum of solar activity a phenomenon that is of particular interest to many branches of natural and social sciences commonly considered to extend from 1645 until 1715. However, our knowledge…
Recently published, precise stellar photometry of 72 Sun-like stars obtained at the Fairborn Observatory between 1993 and 2017 is used to set limits on the solar forcing of Earth's atmosphere of $\pm$ 4.5 W m$^{-2}$ since 1750. This…
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…
From 1997 the Observatorio Nacional has been observing the Sun with an astrolabe in order to study variations on the solar semi-diameter. Till now more than 20.000 observations were done. The observations taken in the year of 2001 were…