Related papers: The beginning of celestial navigation
Near the end of the 16th century Wilhelm IV, Landgraf von Hessen-Kassel, set up an observatory with the main goal to increase the accuracy of stellar positions primarily for use in astrology and for calendar purposes. A new star catalogue…
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…
We discuss the possibility of an autonomous navigation system for spacecraft that is based on pulsar timing data. Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that are observable as variable celestial sources of electromagnetic radiation.…
The exploration of interstellar space will require autonomous navigation systems that do not rely on tracking from the Earth. Here I develop a method to determine the 3D position and 3D velocity of a spacecraft in deep space using a star…
The changing heavens have played a central role in the scientific effort of astronomers for centuries. Galileo's synoptic observations of the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus starting in 1610, provided strong refutation of Ptolemaic…
Pulsars are natural cosmic clocks. On long timescales they rival the precision of terrestrial atomic clocks. Using a technique called pulsar timing, the exact measurement of pulse arrival times allows a number of applications, ranging from…
We discuss the extent to which the visibility of the heavens was a necessary condition for the development of science, with particular reference to the measurement of time. Our conclusion is that while astronomy had significant importance,…
The satellite missions Hipparcos and Gaia by the European Space Agency will together bring a decrease of astrometric errors by a factor 10000, four orders of magnitude, more than was achieved during the preceding 500 years. This modern…
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…
From al-Sufi's tenth-century observation of the Andromeda Galaxy as a "little cloud" to contemporary space missions, Islamic astronomy represents a millennium-spanning tradition of innovation and knowledge. This study traces its trajectory…
Fast moving celestial objects are characterized by velocities across the celestial sphere that significantly differ from the motions of background stars. In observational images, these objects exhibit distinct shapes, contrasting with the…
The new astronomical technique of gravitational microlensing enables measurements of high precision to be made in certain circumstances. Useful advances have been made in the fields of galactic astronomy, stellar astronomy and planetary…
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…
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 study of the Universe and all its contents, the physical phenomena and the evolution of the sky objects has always attracted the Humanity. The Astronomy begins to try to explain these things, others sciences too. Therefore, we think a…
In the distant past, astronomy was often intertwined with religion into a unified cosmos. As science became a distinct cultural enterprise, astronomy has witnessed a variety of rich interactions with other fields. Mathematical statistics…
In normal observation procedures, the position of the observer is specified by GPS and celestial positions of an object will be calculated. But in some situations, like small zenith angle FOVs, GPS doesn't work. Therefore in this study, the…
Astronomy has always been at the forefront of information technology, moving from the era of photographic plates, to digital snapshots and now to digital movies of the sky. This has brought about a data explosion with multi- terabyte…
VLBI observations carried out by global networks provide the most accurate values of the precession-nutation angles determining the position of the celestial pole; as a rule, these results become available two to four weeks after the…
Astronomy is an observationally-led subject where chance discoveries play an important role. A whole range of such discoveries is continually made, from the trivial to the highly significant. What is generally needed is for luck to strike…