Category: Astronomy

Showing Deep Depth in a Star Cluster Engraving, 1865

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2002

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). There are many striking images in this book, and 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. 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 clsuter 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 Engloish astronomer who–with his sister Caroline and brother John–spent decades observing and recroding 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 quck 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.

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

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Astronomy — Information, Quantitative Display of
The Plurality of the Heavens, 1613

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1999

This copy of Thomas Blundeville’s (1522-1606) work on astronomy and navigation contains some very fine examples relating to imaging the history of astronomy–a high-Renaissance work of scholarship and humanism.

The book has a long and detailed title: M. Blundeuile his exercises : containing eight treatises, the titles
whereof are set down in the next printed page : which treatises are very
necessarie to be read and learned of all young gentlemen, that haue not
beene exercised in such disciplines, and yet are desirous to haue
knowledge as well in cosmographie, astronomie, and geographie, as also
in the art of nauigation, in which art it is impossible to profite
without the helpe of these, or such like instructions : to the
furtherance of which art of nauigation, the said M. Blundeuile specially
wrote the said treatises .. with this copy being the fourth edition (corrected and augmented), and printed in London in 1613–an interesting edition, which contained the new data of the circumnavigation of Sir Francis Drake.

[Sources: full text here via the Library of Congress; found via the pinterest collection of Trevor Owens.]

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Astronomy — Information, Quantitative Display of
Splendid Small Astronomical Image–Paper Microscope Exercises,1856

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

These small images are elements composing an engraving from the atlas volume to accompany the polymathic Alexander von Humboldt’s (1769-1759) Kosmos, published in 1856 (the atlas volume online here, at the Biodiversity Library). Each of the small images is about 1.5″ square, with great detail–tiny and remarkable, and very well designed.

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Astronomy — Information, Quantitative Display of
Racism in Space

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Attributing human characteristics to extra-terrestrial bodies is an ancient practice. Constellation It is an ancient human practice of giving stuff human attributes, to allow things to have powers of reason,and understanding, in order to make them understandable, intellectuallyconsumable. This applies to (Father) time, many aspects of the
possibilities of g_d, constellations, planets, the Man in the Moon, facial appellations of the Sun, winds, rain, and so on. Large chunks of our real and imagined worlds are given faces and mentions–that, plus personifications of elements, where we describe the difficult and the invisible with traits that are in our common human understandable currency: like, for example, sin “lurking” and storms “hiding” and meteors “racing”. It makes the complex and uncommon more reasonable.

In all of this, particularly in the personification and anthropomorphization of celestial entities, there are very few examples of vicious and cruel representation of a subject. That is what struck me so about the following cartoon from Puck magazine–I am sure that I have never seen a racist representation of an element in the sky. Until
today.

[The heavenly porter: Caption: “Brush yo’ off, Suh? Ain’t gwine t’ be ’round ag’in foh sev’ty-five yeahs!” Illustration in Puck, v. 67, no. 1733 (1910 May 18), cover. Copyright 1910 by Keppler & Schwarzmann. Source: Trevor Owens, via the LOC.]

This is an example of how engrained racist thinking like this was at that time–and it makes a person think about the unthought aspects of racism exists elsewhere, at other times, and today.

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Astronomy — Bad Ideas
Suprematist Planetary Images of Very High Contrast 1837

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1993

There are times when the future turns up in unexpected places–and sometimes that imagery is quite unintentional, and belongs only to the viewer in that future, looking back. It seems to me that many of these examples belong in the history of scientific illustration

Thomas Dick’s Celestial Scenery, or, The wonders of the planetary system displayed
was published by Harper & Brothers in New York in 1838 is a good example for a home of some of these flashes of future brilliance. What we’re seeing in the pages of this chunky book–which was an influential object in the early reading of a number of people who were to become influential astronomers, one including E.E.. Barnard–are lovely, simple, and include some relatively simple images of size comparisons. The result seems to my eye to suggest Suprematist art, geometrical art that would come into being another 75 years hence or so. (This movement was founded by the great Kazimir Malevich in the 19-teens, who said of it: “Under Suprematism I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.“) Of course the Dick images were simple comparatives and not-yet-art–but they certainly do suggests themselves as something more than what they are. The full text of the book is located at the Internet Archive, here. (Thanks to Trevor Owens and his interesting Pinterest collection here who brought my attention to the Dick book via images of the Martian canals.)

A plan of the rings of Saturn relating their size and some of their imagined composition:

Kazimir Malevich, Black Circle, 1915:

Comparative of the Earth to Saturn’s rings; image bottom, depicts the Sun and Jupiter

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Anticipation, History of — Art History — Astronomy
On Holes in and Life on the Sun, 1787

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1982 History of Holes series #44

The composition of the sun remained basically hidden to scientists until relatively recently–certainly it was well into the 20th century before astronomers/astrophysicists got a good idea of what the sun is, exactly. The perfection of god’s creation and Aristotle’s unchanging nature of the sun must’ve been suspected for a long time given its coronal displays during total eclipse and ancient unaided observation of sunspots (which at least suggested that the sun rotated), but the true nature of the “imperfect” nature of the star wasn’t firmly exhibited until the work of Thomas Harriot and the Fabricus and Galileo and Scheiner–but then there wasn’t that much that could be employed from the data. So too true even with Bunsen and Kirchhoff in their profound invention and discovery in 1859 of the spectrographic analysis of the sun revealing its chemical composition (finding the absorption lines in the spectrum of the sun contained hydrogen,m nicekl, iron, sodium,cacium, and magnesium as starters)–this information was essential in establishing discoveries that would come much later on. (Interesting to note here that the first record of a solar flare is made in this same year by Richard Carrington, and also that this year saw the publication of On the Origin of Species as well as Riemann’s hypothesis and Maxwell’s kinetic theory of gases–a big year in the history of science).

The interesting hypothesis of sunspots as “holes” in the surface of the sun was made by Alexander Wilson (professor of astronomy at the University of Glasgow) in his paper “Observations on the Solar Spots” on 1 January 1774 and published in the Philosophical Transactions (volume 64, pp 1-30, and available here). It was one attempt at an explanation for the mysterious black spots that also opened the door to the possibility of the sun being inhabited. The spots then would have been conical holes in the sun’s photosphere, with the dark part coming from a glimpse of the interior (and presumably cooler) part of the sun.

From the vantage point here in the future this looked like not such a great idea, especially coming only a few years before the (1787) discovery by William Herschel that the sun and the rest of the solar system was in motion relative to the stars and was slowly moving towards a point in the contellation Hercules, which was an enormous scientific breakthrough as well as philosophical-theological chllenge, a cosmological “aha!” moment. That said, Mr. Herschel also held the view that sun spots were possibly cavities in the surface of the sun, the reasoning for which was very good and at times convincing in the absence of anything better, a pretty good product for its time

The beautiful image introducing this post was designed about a hundred years after the Wilson paper, and appeared in the prolific Amédée Guillemin’s (1826-1893) The Sun (translated from the original French in 1875), and which is available in full text pdf from The Haiti Trust. Guillemin spends a chapter on sunspots and holes and presents a convicing history of the idea, and that according to Wilson and others the spots were cavities in a liquid globule envelope and revealed the solid mass of the sun “through a cloudy atmosphere with a grey tiny all around” (page 214).

The epilogue of Guillemin’s book addresses the issue of life on the sun (“Is the Sun Inhabited?”) and in his review Guillemin very plainly makes the case that it is “absolutely impossible to support life” on the sun due to the heat–presently. He qualifies his assessment finally by asking “Will it become habitable?”, and responding that it was “very possible” (page 295), but that it would have to take place in a future where the rest of the planets and everything else has gotten colder.

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Astronomy — History of Holes
Comet, Meteors, Aristotle, and Astrological Nothingness

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1977

It seems to me that in the history of astrology–or at least for what seems to be most of it, at least through the late antiquarian publishing aspect of it–that comets and meteors were basically not utilized. Perhaps it was because in that world these entites didn’t really effect anything–perhaps they were simply mysterious, spurious, and incongruent, and not a subject for installation in the astrological night sky. Comets (from the Greek, kometes, “long-haired”) and meteors (Greek again, from meteoran, a “thing in the air”) and bolides (exploding meteors, from the Greek bolis, or “missile”), holosiderites, siderolites, aerolites uranolites, and so on, have a long and complex story in the history of astronomy, at least in some ways; perhaps the most influential thinker on comets held thinking at bay and did so for two milennia: Aristotle’s Meteorology made the case that comets were not a planet or associated with planets or even necessarily part of the heavens–rather they were a phenomena of the atmosphere. So perhaps their use as astronomical/astrological objects was limited by their very Aristotlean obviousness of being near-Earth objects.

The Comet of 1066 (later named Halleys’ Comet), as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry (completed in the 1080’s)

The fear aspect of comets–the Comet of 1528–was depicted in Ambrose Pares Livres de Chirurgie (1597), and shows what part of the concern was (the coming demise of nations, the death of rules) with the appearance of decapitated heads and a large sword and raining daggers:

[Nicolas Le Rouge, Le Grand Kalendrier et Compost des Bergieres, published in 1496 in Troyes.

The night sky is a mnemonic device, a place to store memory and a holder of the alphabet of myths and beliefs of all, a culture written large across the sky. Meteors and comets were not predictable, and could add nothing insofar as a consistent bit of storytelling was concerned, though they certainly created their own stories in each observed appearance; they could also add punctuation and exclamation to whatever constellation they appeared in. For example if one appeared in a juncture with Jupiter, a major event for royalty would possibly be foretold. But as a permanent element to the visualization of the night sky, they had little power even though they seemed to be displays of fantastic energy and power in themselves.

[For some reason the celestial court, divided by sunlight and flanked by two other sources of light, have ofund it expedient to issue comets from the mouths of Heaven Canon. I’m not sure what’s going on in the forground with the fellow working his spade next to the triangular blankness. the man to his right seems to have been overtaken in fear (as have the group of people visible to the left over the shoveler’s shoulder).]

[Halley’s comet appears again on the title page of this work by the Hungarian George Henischius, a professor of rhetoric, mathematics and medicine at Augsberg.]

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Astronomy — History of Dots — History of Nothing
The Astronomy of the Great Flood

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This lovely if not very convincing argument was produced and directed by “a German engineer, Herr” (Enrst) Horgiger, of Munich. He attempted to wed belief and mythology and astronomy, providing a worlds-in-collision explanation for the Flood. From the caption to the drawing I do not know if it is The Flood of Noah, as it occurs in the book of Genesis in the Bible, or the flood of Apollodorus, or Hygenius, or of the Eridu Genesis (some 2000 years or so before Genesis) or the flood of Atrachasis (of about 1650 bce) or the flood of Gilgamesh (of about 1100 bce), or if it is the flood of Emhil, or Zeus, or Allah, or Yahweh, or the other 150+ great floods of mythology categorized by James Frazer in his astounding but unreadable books. But it is a flood, and his reason is that a wandering body in space came into temporary orbit around the Earth with a resulting gravitational soup that caused the waters to rise up after which the flood occurred and the orbiting sphere to break apart.

As I said, it is a pretty picture, with a nice deep blue background that my scanner won’t capture.

Source: The Illustrated London News, 21 January 1925, “A New Theory of the Flood: How it Might Repeat Itself”.

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Strange Things in the Sky Dept: Martians with Telescopes and Cannons, 1901-1932

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1965

In this episode of the Strange Things in the Sky Department there are a number of posts dealing with Strange Earths–sometimes there are strange Earths int he sky, above the Earth. And so on. In this small offering we see a green-sea earth viewed by Martians from, well, Mars. It is the cover art for sheet music “A Signal from Mars”, composed by Raymond Taylor and arranged by E.T. Paull in 1901. Somehow the Earth is being illuminated by a small canned power source of high energy light that must have the energy of a pulsar, and there’s a five-pointed star that is added for unknown effects. There’s mot much more that can be said, except that the music (sampled below), which is a ragtime march, has nothing to do with Mars so far as I can tell. Mars was certainly in the news when this sheet music was published in 1901–Percy Lowell had taken it upon himself to interpret Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 of “canali” on Mars as “canals” rather than “channels” and convinced himself that what he was seeing with his superior instrumentation were indeed structures built by engineers of another race on another planet. So, perhaps “A Signal from Mars” was much like the Atomic Motels in 1945 and Radium Cakes in 1897–folks just used a popular name in the news to excite interest in their own work via association with repetitive references.

[Source: the Library of Congress] This is a detail from:

Another curious image of Martians with telescopes comes from Puck magazine in 1904:

[Source: the Library of Congress.]

Martians pointing telescopes at the Earth is a much more preferable situation than Martians pointing gigantic cannons:

This is the cover art by the fabulous Frank R. Paul for Stanley D. Bell’s “Martian Guns” found in the January 1932 issue of Wonder Stories.
There’s really no way to determine how big the gun is except to say
that it is probably “big”–there’s just nothing to place the thing in
perspective, as the figures in the foreground, being Martian, don’t have
a specific height. They could be 6′ tall, or 60′–perhaps they’re
only 1/10 of an inch tale, and the projectile they’re firing to the
earth is so devastatingly powerful that size doesn’t matter.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Astronomy — Strange Things in the Sky
A Small Mystery Solved: the Large Telescope on Santa Catalina Island in 1923

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Many years ago in D.C. I bought part of the estate library of Parmelee C. Daniels–the books had been passed down to the next generation, and after their passing some of those books came into my bookstore. Among them was this wonderful photograph, made by P.V. Reyes of Avalon California in 1923. But it wasn’t until tonight that I could easily put together the history of the image. (And when I said “small mystery solved” I meant that it was a small mystery to me–no doubt there will be many others who will identify this instrument on first light).

I found that the photograph was made during the 1923 Solar Eclipse Expedition to Santa Catalina Island at Camp Wrigley, and was attended by Daniels and a host of the Big Names of astronomy of the 19-teens and ‘twenties. Daniels was a professor at Drake University in Des Moines, and the school’s telescope was packed up and made the trip to the Pacific. I do believe that this is the 8.5-inch refractor that was the gift to the school of General Drake in 1893, although I could be wrong.

Here’s the image of the telescope (with Daniels standing on the box, President of Drake University and astronomy professor Dr. Morehouse, and Prof. Edwin B. Frost. The image comes from the University of Chicago:

[PC Daniels photo on the solar eclipse expedition of 1923 via the University of Chicago, http://storage.lib.uchicago.edu/ucpa/series6/derivatives_series6/apf6-03446-031r.jpg]

And so the story of this photograph gained some life tonight by me simply plumbing the intertubes for information. Unfortunately I do not know the identity of the boy in the sailor’s suit.

I received the following information on the telescope, generously supplied by Bart Fried of the Antique Telescope Society:

8 1/4″ Brashear/Warner&Swasey refractor, 1894. (Curiously, in a
dedicatory article in the 1922 issue of “Popular Astronomy” it is
described by the chief astronomer at Drake University, Daniel Morehouse
as a 9″ telescope). According to Kirby-Smith (U.S. Observatories, Van
Nostrand Reinhold), it has an interchangeable front flint element for
visual or photographic work, and has a 5″ doublet Brashear camera and a
polarizing solar eyepiece. Possibly also, a filar micrometer and a
spectroscope.

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Astronomy — Photography