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Milestones of Information Exchange in Astronomy from Prehistory to the Present
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
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“That tho’ a Man were admitted into Heaven to view the wonderful Fabrick of the World, and the Beauty of the Stars, yet what would be otherwise be Rapture and Extasie would be but a melancholy Amazement if he had not a Friend to communicate it to.”
Attributed to Archytas by Christian Huygens
The Beginnigs. The origins of astronomy as a science can be traced back to the time when watchers of the sky first began to record the results of their observations and transmit them succeeding generations. The media used by these earliest astronomers were various, from great megalithic monuments like Stonehenge to the clay tablets of the Babylonian ephemerists and the papyrus rolls of the Egyptians.
Even in Antiquity such records were the foundation for the advance of astronomical knowledge. Thus the Chaldean Tables of the Babylonian had a great influence on the development of Greek astronomy. And in 130 B.C. Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes by comparing his own observations with those of Timocharis a century and a half earlier. Later even Copernicus himself used the results of Timocharis, Ptolemy, and al-Battani.
- Type
- Part 8. Other Papers
- Information
- International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 110: Library and Information Services in Astronomy , 1989 , pp. 211 - 213
- Copyright
- Copyright © United States Naval Observatory 1989
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