相关论文: Astronomical tent observatories, relics of a bygon…
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 1847 Christian Ludwig Gerling, Marburg (Germany), suggested the solar parallax to be determined by measuring the position of Venus close to its inferior conjunction, especially at the stationary points, from observatories on nearly the…
Over two hundred years ago Capt. James Cook sailed up Whitsunday Passage, just a few miles where we now sit, on a voyage of astronomical observation and discovery that remains an inspiration to us all. Since the prospects of our visiting…
Astronomical observations were used as a marker for time and the Calendar from ancient times. A more subtle calibration of epochs is thrown up by an observation of the position of the solstices and equinoxes, because these points shift in…
Longitude determination at sea gained increasing commercial importance in the late Middle Ages, spawned by a commensurate increase in long-distance merchant shipping activity. Prior to the successful development of an accurate marine…
This work addresses the development of the astronomical observatory all through history, from an architectural point of view, as a building in relation to the observing instruments and their functioning as a heterogeneous work center. We…
Nowadays the more powerful method to detect extrasolar planets is the transit method. We review the planet transits which were anticipated, searched, and the first ones which were observed all through history. Indeed transits of planets in…
In February 1700, Isaac Newton needed a precise tropical year to design a new universal calendar that would supersede the Gregorian one. However, 17th-Century astronomers were uncertain of the long-term variation in the inclination of the…
The voyage of the "First Fleet" from Britain to the new colony of New South Wales was not only a military enterprise, it also had a distinct scientific purpose. Britain's fifth Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, had selected William Dawes,…
The objective reality of the Earth's motion about the Sun was finally proven observationally by Bradley (1727) when he correctly explained the ~20'' annual, elliptical motions of stars as being due to aberration of starlight caused by the…
The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years…
The great meridian line in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome was built in 1701/1702 with the scope of measuring the obliquity of the Earth's orbit in the following eight centuries, upon the will of Pope Clement XI. During the…
The past fifty years have been an epoch of impressive progress in the field of astronomical technology. Practically all the technical tools, which we use today, have been developed during that time span. While the first half of this period…
An unambiguous accordance between an objective lens for Ayscough's telescope 'Adapted to Use at Sea' and another compound lens which was described by William Eastland in well-known Quere during the trial in October of 1765 was revealed.…
Only seven transits of Venus have been observed and studied up to now since the first astronomical observations with the telescope: 1639, 1761-69, 1874-82 and 2004-12. The measurement of the Astronomical Unit has been one of the main goal…
Astronomical sites occupying observing instruments have to be selected according to many factors. Among these factors, geographic location of the site and quality of atmosphere above the site play an important role in the decision process.…
By c. 3000 BC, in the late Neolithic, there had been a significant change in the way people materialized their cosmology across Scotland with the introduction of free-standing stones. These were erected almost until the end of the Bronze…
With the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planetary system back to 1999, a great number of projects started to hunt for other similar systems. Because of the incidence rate of such systems was unknown and the length of the…
The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, is an infrared observatory of novel design: deployable, with active optics, fully open to space for radiative cooling and orbiting the Lagrange point no. 2. This article explains the…
The measurement of the solar diameter is introduced in the wider framework of solar variability and of the influences of the Sun upon the Earth's climate. Ancient eclipses and planetary transits would permit to extend the knowledge of the…