Related papers: Galileo Galilei and Satellite Navigation
Four hundred years after its publication, Galileo's masterpiece Sidereus Nuncius is still a mine of useful information for historians of science and astronomy. In his short book Galileo reports a large amount of data that, despite its age,…
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…
In 1614, the German astronomer Simon Mayr published his claim to have discovered the satellites of Jupiter. Writing in the treatise Mundus Jovialis, Mayr made his assertion in a convoluted but unequivocal manner, earning the displeasure of…
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…
What are the historical evidence concerning the turning of the spyglass into an astronomical instrument, the telescope? In Sidereus Nuncius and in his private correspondence Galileo tells the reader what he did with the telescope, but he…
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…
Galileo Galilei had sufficient skill as an observer and instrument builder to be able to measure the positions and apparent sizes of objects seen through his telescopes to an accuracy of 2" or better. However, Galileo had no knowledge of…
In 1980 Kowal and Drake found that in December 1612 and January 1613 Galileo observed the planet Neptune. At that time, according to these authors, Galileo was able to measure angular separations with an accuracy of about 10 seconds of arc.…
Galileo determined distances to stars based on the assumption that stars were suns, the apparent sizes of stars as seen through his telescope, and basic geometry. However, the apparent sizes that he measured were the result of diffraction…
In October 1604, when SN1604, the last naked-eye visible supernova in our Galaxy, exploded, Galileo Galilei was the professor of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Padua, teaching the mechanics of planets. He was therefore the…
After Galileo's publication of the Sidereus Nuncius in 1610, Giovanni Battista Agucchi obtained in 1611 an estimate of the orbital periods of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter using the figures published in the book. The article shows how…
Galileo Galilei believed that stars were distant suns whose sizes, measured via his telescope, were a direct indication of distance -- fainter stars (appearing smaller in the telescope) were farther away than brighter ones. Galileo argued…
In this work, an attempt is presented to understand the contribution of Galileo Galilei in the field of the History of Ideas, from the moment he points a spyglass to the sky. For that, it was previously necessary that Giotto painting the…
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 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,…
The question, Did Simon Marius (1573-1625) observe Jupiter's satellites on January 8, 1610 (December 29, 1609 in the Julian calendar) is moot, for he did not disclose his research method and the instrument he used. To resolve this issue we…
An intriguing reference to the existence of a self-portrait by Galileo Galilei is contained in the biography of the scientist by Thomas Salusbury dated ca. 1665, of which only one incomplete and inaccessible copy exists. Galileo grew up in…
Exactly 500 years ago, Nicolaus Copernicus drew a lattice of lines on a panel above the doorway to his rooms at Olsztyn Castle, then in the Bishopric of Warmia. Although its design has long been regarded as some kind of reflecting vertical…
Galileo's realization that nature is not scale invariant, motivating his subsequent discovery of scaling laws, is traced to two lectures he gave on the geography of Dante's Inferno.
We present a new careful and comprehensive analysis the observations of the satellites of Jupiter from the Sidereus Nuncius that extends and complements previous similar studies. Each observation is compared to the predictions obtained…