Related papers: An astronomical analysis of Hipparchus' Commentari…
We are pleased to present a Special Section on Statistics and Astronomy in this issue of the The Annals of Applied Statistics. Astronomy is an observational rather than experimental science; as a result, astronomical data sets both small…
For several decades a portrait of Johannes Kepler has been widely circulating among professional astronomers, scientific and academic institutions, and the general public. Despite its provenance and identification having been questioned in…
Previously, the most prominent explanation for the Star of Bethlehem was to identify one of many astronomical events in the sky as being the inspiration for the trip of the Magi. However, all the astronomical answers have detailed…
The question of annual stellar parallax is usually viewed as having been a "win-win situation" for seventeenth-century astronomers who subscribed to the Copernican view of universe in which the Earth orbits the Sun and the Sun is one of…
In 1717 Halley compared contemporaneous measurements of the latitudes of four stars with earlier measurements by ancient Greek astronomers and by Brahe, and from the differences concluded that these four stars showed proper motion. An…
Since the dawn of telescopic astronomy astronomers have observed and measured the "spurious" telescopic disks of stars, generally reporting that brighter stars have larger disks than fainter stars. Early observers such as Galileo Galilei…
I offer a revisionist interpretation of Galileo's role in the history of science. My overarching thesis is that Galileo lacked technical ability in mathematics, and that this can be seen as directly explaining numerous aspects of his life's…
The Hipparcos satellite was launched in 1989. It was the first, and remains to date the only, attempt at performing large-scale astrometric measurements from space. Hipparcos marked a fundamentally new approach to the field of astrometry,…
Context.A new reduction of the astrometric data as produced by the Hipparcos mission has been published, claiming accuracies for nearly all stars brighter than magnitude Hp = 8 to be better, by up to a factor 4, than in the original…
A critical assessment of the quality of the Hipparcos data, partly supported by a completely new analysis of the raw data, is presented with the aim of clarifying reliability issues that have surfaced since the publication of the Hipparcos…
De Houtman in 1603, Kepler in 1627 and Halley in 1679 published the earliest modern catalogues of the southern sky. We provide machine-readable versions of these catalogues, make some comparisons between them, and briefly discuss their…
An ancient Egyptian Calendar of Lucky and Unlucky Days, the Cairo Calendar (CC), assigns luck with the period of 2.850 days. Previous astronomical, astrophysical and statistical analyses of CC support the idea that this was the period of…
This letter follows a recent claim that the Hipparcos parallax for Polaris could be too small by 2.5 mas. It examines in detail the Hipparcos epoch astrometric data for Polaris, as well as the viability of other observations that were put…
Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lema\^itre are undoubtedly the real fathers of Big Bang cosmologies. In this article I study the influences their work underwent due to some religious as well as anti-religious ideas. During his career…
Certain results of observational cosmology cast critical doubt on the foundations of standard cosmology but leave most cosmologists untroubled. Alternative cosmological models that differ from the Big Bang have been published and defended…
Free translation of the original abstract in Spanish: Some of the most relevant milestones due to, or instigated by, mathematicians concerning the creation, development and advances of Cosmology as a scientific discipline are presented and…
Supportive attitudes can bring to a blossoming science, while neglect can quickly make science absent from everyday life and provide a very primitive view of the world. We compare one important Greek achievement, the computation of the…
A re-examination of a well-known iconographic source, the "Allegory of Sight" by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, reveals that one of the two telescopes depicted in the painting has a highly unusual,and until now unknown to the…
In the late 1620s the Neapolitan telescope maker Francesco Fontana was the first to observe the sky using a telescope with two convex lenses, which he had manufactured himself. Fontana succeeded in drawing the most accurate maps of the…
Perhaps more than other physical sciences, astronomy is frequently statistical in nature. The objects under study are inaccessible to direct manipulation in the laboratory, so the astronomer is restricted to observing a few external…