Related papers: The beginning of celestial navigation
Astrophotonics lies at the interface of astronomy and photonics. This burgeoning field -- now formally recognized by the optics community -- has emerged over the past decade in response to the increasing demands of astronomical…
Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) brought navigation to the masses. Coupled with smartphones, the blue dot in the palm of our hands has forever changed the way we interact with the world. Looking forward, cyber-physical systems…
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…
During the first few centuries CE, the centre of the known world gradually shifted from Alexandria to Constantinople. Combined with a societal shift from pagan beliefs to Christian doctrines, Antiquity gave way to the Byzantine era. While…
Global navigation satellite systems use appropriate satellite constellations to get the coordinates of an user -close to Earth- in an almost inertial reference system. We have simulated both GPS and GALILEO constellations. Uncertainties in…
Observational Cosmology has indeed made very rapid progress in recent years. The ability to quantify the universe has largely improved due to observational constraints coming from structure formation Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more…
Exoplanets, or planets outside our own solar system, have long been of interest to astronomers; however, only in the past two decades have scientists had the technology to characterize and study planets so far away from us. With advanced…
A basic telescope and a chronometer can be used to learn classical methods of spherical astronomy. The conjunction Venus-Saturn of July 2, 2007 has been observed through July 3 with a 50 mm telescope. Planetary daily motions and angular…
Some 400 years after Galileo, modern telescopes have enabled humanity to "see" what the natural eye cannot. Astronomical images today contain information about incredibly large objects located across vast distances and reveal information…
The ProAm effort in modern astronomy and astrophysics is now a reality. The achievements of amateur astronomers throughout the early history of astronomy are well known. However, during the 20th century, the high specialisation and the…
The modern usage of the words astronomy and astrology is traced back to distinctions, largely ignored in recent scholarship. Three interpretations of celestial phenomena (in a geometric, a substantialist and a prognostic versions) coexisted…
High-quality, usable, and effective software is essential for supporting astronomers in the discovery-focused tasks of data analysis and visualisation. As the volume, and perhaps more crucially, the velocity of astronomical data grows, the…
Astronomers in the early 17th century misunderstood the images of stars that they saw in their telescopes. For this reason, the data a skilled observer of that time acquired via telescopic observation of the heavens appeared to support a…
As the most ancient branch of astronomy, astrometry has been developed for thousands of years. However, it has only recently become possible to utilize astrometry for the detection of exoplanets. Gaia, an astrometric surveyor of 1 billion…
This paper investigates the determination of the Qibla direction using both astronomical and geometrical approaches. The study reviews historical and classical methods employed by Muslim scholars and astronomers including the use of…
Cultural astronomy is an interdisciplinary area of research that studies how perceptions and concepts related to the sky are part of the worldview of a culture. One of its branches, archaeoastronomy, focuses on the material remains of past…
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…
The space-time correlations of streams of photons can provide fundamentally new channels of information about the Universe. Today's astronomical observations essentially measure certain amplitude coherence functions produced by a source.…
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…
In this paper, we propose novel methods to increase total luminosity and decrease error propagation during subluminal or luminal interstellar transits by navigation with star maps. We demonstrate with theoretical and simulation models in…