Category: Astronomy

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

[Image Source Smithsonian Institution, Dibner Library, here: http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/HST/Huygens/huygens-ill32.htm]

Christian Huygens (1629-1695) worked across many fields, including astronomy, biology, math and physics, and was extraordinarily productive, making numerous contributions in the physical and theoretical areas, as well as being a prolific author and correspondent. 

These images were published in his Systema Saturium…, published in the Hague in 1659¹, which was his fundamental work on the planet and in which he announces the discovery of its rings–this was a very considerable element, because the “arms” encompassing the planet had been a mystery to a generation of astronomers, from Galileo onward. The roman numerals relate the belief in the structure of the rings according to observer, so I was made by Galileo in 1610,  II by Scheiner, 1614; III by Riccioli,1641-1643. IV-VII by Hevelius; VIII and IX by Riccioli, 1648-1650; X by Divini, 1646-1648. XI  by Fontana in 1636;  XII  by Gassendi in 1646, and  XIII by Fontana and others from 1644-1645. (This list identifying the rings of Saturn over time come from notes I had taken and misplaced, though the original I am sure comes from published work by Ronald Brashear, head of Special Collections at the Smithsonian.)

 Here’s Huygen’s own beautiful and modern image of the planet, from his page 21 of his work above:

[Source Smithsonian Institution, Dibner Library, here: http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/HST/Huygens/huygens-ill32.htm]

And then, here, a more modern image courtesy of the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft;

[Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, here.]

Notes:

1. From the title page:  Christiani Hvgenii … Systema Satvrnivm; sive, De causis mirandorum Satvrni phænomenôn, et comite ejus planeta nova. Hagæ-Comitis, ex typographia A. Vlacq, (1659).

JF Ptak Science Books   (Expanding an earlier post from 2013, but different enough to get its own Post # 2297) 

Thinking about the depth of space and visually explaining it are two different things–vast numbers and the deepest depths, all colliding with the imagination, which really has a hard time keeping up with it all.

This beautiful engraving appeared in Amedee Guillemin’s  Le Ciel: notions d’astronomie a l’usage des gens du monde et de la jeunesse, which was published by Librairie de L. Hachette and Company, and printed in 1865 (the images from which are available here). Guillemin (1826-1893) was a social/culture writer who became a very respected science journalist/writer, becoming very popular with works in physics, technology, astronomy and general science, many lavishly illustrated. 

There are many striking images in this book, The Sky/the Heavens…, but I’ve chosen this one because it has a certain deep depth to it, and relays a complexity and distinctness to something that is generally imaged as being less so, being a massive star cluster and all.  Unlike many of his other books, the great illustrations here are the small text images, some only 25% of the page, and in most cases rendered sparingly, and with a real feel of “difference” to them (at least so to me).

The “Amas du Toucan”, known now more familiarly as 47 Toucanae or 47 Tuc (NGC 104), is a bright element in the southern sky, a huge cluster 120 light years wide and 16,700 light years from Earth, visible to the naked eye in the constellation Toucan (created by Petrus Plancius in 1598 or so).   And here it is, in a little 9×8 cm engraving with hundreds of white points as stars, made after an engraving of Sir William Herschel (1738-1822, a German-born English astronomer who–with his sister Caroline and brother John–spent decades observing and recording stars, double stars, clusters and nebulae).  

47 Tuc was first catalogued as not-a-star by Abbe Nicolas Louis de Lacaille (1713-1762),  a French astronomer who found it too be too fuzzy to be a single star, and who produced a 10,000 (Southern) star catalog, Coelum Australe Stelliferum, which was published in 1762, and which also introduced 14 new constellations.  47 Tuc made another quick appearance in the great Catalogue des Nébuleuses et des Amas d’Étoiles (“Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters”), a superb and meticulous work by Charles Messier, and published in 1771.

But distances and depths such as we know them now were not-conceivable at this point for Guillemin–and really would be for another 60 years or so.  At this point, and for some time to come, the Milky Way was considered to be the entirety of the universe. The business of galaxies being outside of the Milky Way is a relatively recent development, determined so by Harlow Shapley in 1924, expanding the size of the universe ten-fold to 300,000 light years; this was blown up a quite a bit by Edwin Hubble in ’24 to 900,000 light years, and then five years later in one of his most famous papers Hubble blew the figure up a lot, expanding the universe to 280 million light years.  Walter Baade and others added to the figure in the 1950’s (4 billion light years or so), and during the 1960’s-1990’s the figure expanded to 25-30 billion light years, finding its way to 94 billion light years in 2006.  

I would imagine that the concept of galaxies outside of our own, and that the universe was vastly larger than we thought, and that the potential for there being new/unforeseen discoveries was great, that in 1924/1929 it may have seemed somewhat like Galileo suddenly seeing an order of magnitude more stars than had ever been seen before by the naked eye…that the sky which had basically been unchanged in appearance to humans for thousands of years really wasn’t what people thought it was.  Perhaps it was like the Two Dimensional beings in Flatland  trying to comprehend the first appearance of a Three Dimensional entity.  Or of course the realization could have been like when Sandy Cheeks came to the shocking epiphany in an episode of the Immortal Sponge Bob Square Pants that the titanic battle she had been waging and ostensibly won with an Alaskan Bull Worm was just her fighting with the tip of the beast’s tongue–oh. Oh my.  Something along those orders.  Deep depth.  

The Guillemin work is simply a lovely and elegant thing–one of many accomplishments in a beautiful and relatively simple book. 

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Well, these look unusual to me, mainly because I do not understand the representation of the Sun in either image.  The first image (printed I guess around 1860) is the easier of the two, showing the Oikoumene, the inhabited world, of the Earth as known to Herodotus, the orbis herodoti, of the 5th century bce.  All of the land to the right (south) is Libya, Arabia, Persia, and India, all undifferentiated, though we can see the Nile delta. The two main land masses poking into the sea are Thrace and Phrygia, with

no sign of very much to the west of that, no sign of Italy, nothing for the Celtic regions or Iberia, with some hint of polar regions.  Why the Sun is so, I am not sure.  

The red Sun makes another appearance in the outline of the solar system, in the next image.  It is red, and brilliantly so, and firey; in the place of the Earth in the third sphere is the Moon, and beyond that another yellow firey star, which I take to be, perhaps, our own planet.  I can’t read this one, the yellow star and all…though it is very pretty.  

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2205 

This beautiful object is Le jeu de la sphere ou de l’univers selon Tyco Brahe  [The game of the (celestial) sphere, or the universe according…] and was printed in 1661, and was an educational toy for the advancement of kids young and old. It was played with a spinner and took the players on a tour of the universe, compiled in 4 elements, 7 planets, the constellations of the Northern hemisphere, the Zodiac, then constellations of the Southern hemisphere, and then the Empyrean. Presumably after playing at the game for some time the players would know something at least through familiarity.  

Source;  NYPL Digital Collections, here.

A listing of the stops areound the baord: 

 1) Earth ; Case 2) Water ; 3) the three Regions of the air;  4)  Region of Fire ; 5) the Moon ; 6) Mercury ; 7) Venus ;  8) the Sun ;  9) March ; 10)  Jupiter ; 11) Saturn ; 12)  the firmament ; 13)  the Little Dipper ;  14)  the Dragon ; 15) Cepheus ; 16) Cassiopeia ;  17) the Camel ;18) the Great Bear ; 19) La Teste in Cheveleure Berenice ; 20) The Bouvier ;  21) Hercules Crown of the North ; 22 ) The Serpent ; 23 )  Antinois ; 24)  Sting Eagle ;25)  the Liré sign; 26)  the Dolphin Horse ; 27)  the Pegasus Horse ; Case . 28)  Andromeda ; Case . 29 ) The Triangle of the North the Abelles ; Case . 30) : Perseus ; Case . 31)  the hide ;32)  the Aries ; 33) Taurus ; 34)  the Gemini ;  the Escreuisse ; 36) Lyon ;37) the Virgin  38)  Libra ; 39) : Scorpio ;  40): the Sagittarius ; 41) Capricorn ; ) : the VerseEau ;  43)  Pisces ; 44) : the Balene ;  45) : the Eridau River ; 46) : Orion ; 47) : the Unicorn ;48)  Little Escreuisse Canucule or small dog ;  49) the Hydra of the North Raven ; 50) : Vase ;  51) the Centaur ;52)  the wolf ;  53)  the Altar ; 54) Crown Midy Dard du Midi ;  55) : the Poisson ‘s Gruc ; 56)  the Phenix ; 57)  the Hare ; 58)  Canis Major ; 59) Rooster Turkey ;  60) : the Dove ; 61) : L’Arche Christmas ;  62) : the Dorado Cloud the Hirondele ;  63) The Cameleon Fly ; 64 ) The Triangle Midy Bee Indiene ;  65) the Peacock ; 66) Indian ;  67)  the Tocan the Hidre Southward ; 68)  Premiere Mobille ; 69) Sky Christallin ; 70) : Sky Empyrean.

Earlier in this blog appeared a similar and later game: 

–-“Whoever first arrives here is to take the title of Astronomer Royal‘”–end point of the game The Pleasures of Astronomy

I’m not sure how early the earliest board game featuring a scientific game might be, but I do know that this one–Science in Sport, or the Pleasures of Astronomy; A New & Instructive Pastime. Revised & approved by Mrs. Bryan; Blackheath–seems to be very advanced for its age.  Made in 1804 by John Wallis on London, the game such as it is isn’t very “game-y”–the gaming aspect of it isn’t very interesting or involved–mostly the mostly-representative aspect so the game is to just expose the young players to select aspects of the history of astronomy. As a pedagogical tool, the game probably works pretty nicely. 

The game board, or the course of the game, is relatively standard, though the subject matter is not. The object was to arrive at Flamsteed House¹, and by the course of victory the young player would become acquainted with elements of morals, ethics, natural philosophy (although Wallis did in fact produce a very similar game for that topic alone) plus of course some basics of astronomy. 

Notes:

1. “Flamsteed House, the original Observatory building at Greenwich, was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke and built in 1675-76.”  See here for more information.