Astronomy

Featured exhibit items for astronomy.

Exhibit Items

	Map of the Moon Hevelius, Johann (1647) Accurate depiction of the topography of the Moon was accomplished by mid-century in this lunar atlas by Hevelius. It set a new standard for precision that remained unmatched for a century.
	Celestial Globe Gores Coronelli, Vincenzo (1693; reprint ca. 1800) Coronelli, a Franciscan theologian and astronomer who worked in both Italy and France, was a founder of modern geography and an influential maker of celestial and terrestrial globes.
1	Almagest, ed. Regiomontanus Ptolemy, Claudius (1496) Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaios) lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the second century. Ptolemy’s technical work on astronomy, originally written in Greek, was titled Almagest (“The Greatest”) by its Arabic translators.
2	Astronomical Calendar, 1476 Regiomontanus, (1476) In this book, Regiomontanus predicted the positions of the Sun and Moon for 40 years. He designed a sundial to work independently of one’s latitude, and a volvelle, or circular dial, to locate the position and phase of the Moon according to date and time.
3	The New Astronomy Kepler, Johann (1609) This is Kepler’s famous pretzel diagram, where he focused attention on the planet rather than the rotating solid sphere which carried the planet. In an Earth-centered system, the planet must follow some kind of similar pretzel path as it is carried along within a thick solid sphere.
5	On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, 1543 Copernicus, Nicolaus (1543) Copernicus argued that the Sun rather than the Earth lies in the center of the universe. The Earth moves as a planet around the Sun. In 1543 little proof was available that the Earth moves; there were many reasons not to accept it.
7	Sacred Mystery of the Structure of the Cosmos Kepler, Johann (1596) By far the best known 16th-century defender of Copernicus was Johann Kepler. In this work he demonstrated that vast empty regions lying between the planetary spheres, which were required by Copernicus, were not wasted space.
7	On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon Samos, Aristarchus of (1572) Aristarchus, the Copernicus of antiquity, proposed in the 3rd century B.C.E. that the Sun lies at the center of the universe and that the Earth and other planets revolve around the Sun.
9	Introduction to Astronomy, 1706 Baba, Nobutake (1706) This work, written by a Kyoto physician, represents Asian astronomy in the generation following Adam Schall. Baba countered superstitious interpretations of solar eclipses, and used magnetic theory rather than yin and yang to explain the tides. Baba adopted the Tychonic model of cosmology.
12	The New Almagest, part 1 Riccioli, Giambattista (1651) The frontispiece of Riccioli’s treatise depicts not two, but three major systems of the world. The Ptolemaic system rests discarded (lower right corner) because of the phases of Venus and Mercury (upper left corner). All-seeing Argus looks on, holding a telescope.