Sidereus Nuncius

I watched the lunar eclipse last night, standing in the yard with a pair of old birding binoculars. The sky clouded over completely just after the full eclipse, but I was able to see the first half of it pretty well. A telescope would have been better, but through the binoculars you can see well enough to get a nice sense of the Moon’s three dimensionality. I’ll have to remind myself to go out with the binoculars again on a clear night.

In the meantime, the Moon in antiquarian books:

• The University of Vienna offers a download of a 1515 Italian edition of Ptolemy’s treatise on astronomical mathematics, the Almagest, (The Great Book) which has two chapters on the movements of the moon and eclipses.

• An image from the Almagest hosted by the University of Minnesota:

• The Linda Hall Library has created Face of the Moon, a detailed online exhibit featuring scientific Moon images from the Renaissance through the 1970s.

• The CalTech Institute Archives has a large digital collection, including some of Galileo’s Moon images from the Sidereus Nuncius (the Sidereal Messenger) of 1610. This was first scientific work based on observations made using a telescope. Besides the Moon it includes studies of the stars and the moons of Jupiter.

• A Time Magazine article on watercolor sketches in a printer’s proof of Sidereus Nuncius which may be in Galileo’s own hand.

• Moon map by Johannes Helvius, 1647, from the digital collection of the U.S. Naval Observatory Library, which has made available a number of fantastic astronomical images:

Filed under astronomy, exhibitions, galileo, hevlius, moon, ptolemy, rare books, science | Comments (2)