Please join two interesting discussions on historical astronomy

Northern California Historical Astronomy

Luncheon and Discussion Association

www.nchalada.org (Thanks to Bruce!)

Chabot Space & Science Center, 10000 Skyline Boulevard, Oakland

in the Board Room, Dellums Building (West end)

Morning discussion, 10 - 12:30:

Chair: Alan R. Fisher

Chabot Space & Science Center

Lunch at a local restaurant, then a brief business meeting.

Afternoon discussion, 2 - 5 PM:

Chair: Bruce R. Mehlman

For further information, contact:

Norm Sperling

EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE

413 Poinsettia Avenue

San Mateo, California 94403

Phone & fax: 650-573-7125

Remember that sessions are always discussions, never lectures. Your contributions are eagerly welcomed.

For the History of Rocketry, see W. Von Braun, F. I. Ordway III, D. Dooling, Space Travel: A History, Harper and Row, 1995.

Pre-scientific drawings of things in the sky. Astrology will not be considered pre-scientific, I will lump it in with astronomy until the sixteenth century.

Drawings from the Eastern (India, China, Japan) traditions.

Pre-Hellenic Egypt, a different astrology.

Mesopotamia. Astrology as we know it begins here.

Greece. We will introduce the distinction between pictures (of things as they are seen) and schema (diagrams, graphs).

I'll likely skip Rome, unless someone brings something.

From the Muslim Empire, some schema that advanced beyond Ptolemy, and some pictures of constellations that include paintings of what the constellation was supposed to represent.

The early (pre-telescope) Renaissance schema of the Ptolemaic, Tychonian and Copernican universes.

The telescope changed everything. Details of the Moon and the planets were drawn for the first time. Mars especially was drawn with far more detail than actually existed.

Astrophotography changed it all again. Except for the planets, pictures waned while schema progressed. The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is my canonical example of this.

Copyright © 2001, Bruce R. Mehlman

Norm Sperling adds: For an exhibit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is putting together to include "the historical evolution of astronomical images and imaging techniques" participants in the HASTRO-L list suggested:

• Last year an exhibition at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris covered this. The catalogue has been published as: Dans le champ des Etoiles: Les photographes et le ciel 1850-2000 by Quentin Bajac, Aurelien Barrau, Denis Canguilhem, Agnes de Gouvion Saint-Cyr & Francoise Launay, Published by: Reunion des Musees nationaux, Paperback, 192 pages, 100 b&w and 90 color illustrations. 190 FrF. (This exhibition is now showing at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and the catalogue should be available in German.)

• petroglyphs which were attributed to the Crab Supernova

• Oxford MS Laud Misc. 644 contains a few pages illustrating constellations. They have well-drawn figures of humans, animals, etc. with stars drawn over them; as opposed to the modern method of illustrating the constellations by drawing lines between the stars, the emphasis in these figures appears to be the images, rather than the stars.
• British Library MS Harley 4350 contains a handful of miniatures at the beginning of various treatises. Relevant to astronomy, there is a seated figure holding an armillary sphere(?) at the beginning of Grosseteste's De Sphaera; a figure holding either a planisphere or an astrolabe at the beginning of another treatise; and a figure pointing to columns in a book, with stars above his head, suggesting astronomical tables, at the beginning of Grosseteste's Compotus correctorius.
• Tycho's and/or Kepler's maps with their supernovae
• Kepler's account of pinholes (Optics, ch. 2)
• the eclipse instrument described by Kepler using pinhole projection (Optics, beginning of ch. 11).
• Hevelius's epochal moon map
• old drawings by Galileo (Jovian Moons, in particular)
• Galileo's chance observation of Neptune.

• Joseph Fraunhofer's solar spectrum
• Lord Rosse's drawing of M51, the discovery image of spiral "nebulae"
• John Herschel's photo of the framework of his father's telescope

• famous firsts in ground-based astronomical photography: the Moon, the Sun, a solar eclipse, a planet, and so forth.
• the first spectrogram: Vega? (Huggins? Draper?)
• the first photograph of a star (July 17, 1850, at Harvard)
• David Gill's plate of the comet of 1881(?) showing so many stars
• Roberts, Isaac, Photographs of Stars, Star Clusters and Nebulae, vol. 1, London, 1893 – especially his first photographic image of M31, which first revealed to us that the Andromeda Nebula is a spiral
• Keeler's work with the Crossley Reflector at Lick.
• E. E. Barnard's wide-angle work, such as an image from "Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way." (Ideally a plate showing dramatic dark nebulae.)
• ultra-wide-angle shot of Halley in 1910 at Lowell Observatory.
• There is a movie film of an eclipse taken from a plane over South America in the 1920s
• the Lowell/Tombaugh discovery plates of Pluto.
• Edwin Hubble's 6 October 1923 image of the Andromeda "nebula", M31, taken with the Mount Wilson 100" Hooker telescope
• Baade, W. "NGC 147 and NGC 185, Two New Members of the Local Group of Galaxies." Astrophysical Journal, 100 (Sep. 1944), 147
• Heber Curtis's first photo of a supernova in a spiral
• the first McMath-Hulbert moving pictures of the movement of prominences.
• a very early Schmidt plate (examples in Amateur Telescope Making, Advanced)
• the first focogram
• Dennis diCicco’s analemma
• back about 1983, a very thin annular solar eclipse crossed the US East Coast. On a single piece of large-format color film, with one exposure and one neutral-density filter, Dennis diCicco simultaneously recorded 1) the extreme brightness of the solar photosphere; 2) the filtered photosphere; 3) Bailey's Beads; 4) the chromosphere; 5) beautiful prominences; 6) the inner corona -- all in a beautiful composition.
• the sequence of images of eta Carinae currently gracing the covers of JAH2
• Bob O'Dell's stunning three dimensional image of M42

• some of the first satellite images of Earth

• The first image of the moon taken from a US spacecraft
• the digital imaging and enhancement technology developed by Dr. Robert Nathan at JPL during the Ranger program. His widely-published before and after images of a lunar crater would be a good example.

• Mariner 4 Mars images (in particular, first crater image), perhaps augmented by orbital and surface images of later spacecraft
• Apollo 8's "Earth Rise" over the Moon image
• Venera Venus surface images

• Serge Koutchmy did some very clever pix of the sun in "eclipse" (from Skylab) with an H-alpha sun over the "moon."

• Giotto's Halley images

• for humor, Adamski's "chicken brooder" flying saucer photograph, which provided the canonical form for the post-war UFO.