The Victorian Amateur Astronomer
The Victorian Amateur Astronomer

Author: Allan Chapman

Publisher:

Published: 2017-10-26

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 9780852445440

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This is the first book to look in detail at amateur astronomy in Victorian Britain. It deals with the technical issues that were active in Victorian astronomy, and reviews the problems of finance, patronage and the dissemination of scientific ideas, including the relationship between the amateur and the professional in Britain. It contains a wealth of previously unpublished biographical and anecdotal material, and an extended bibliography with notes incorporating much new scholarship. This long-awaited new edition of the Victorian Amateur Astronomer brings Allan Chapman's ground-breaking research on the role of the amateur in the development of astronomy to a new generation. He shows that while on the Continent astronomical research was lavishly supported by the state, in Britain such research was paid for out of the pockets of highly educated, wealthy gentlemen - the so-called 'Grand Amateurs'. It was these powerful individuals who commissioned the telescopes, built the observatories, ran the learned societies, and often stole discoveries from their state-employed colleagues abroad. In addition to the 'Grand Amateurs', Victorian Britain also contained many self-taught amateurs. Although they belonged to no learned societies, these people provide a barometer of the popularity of astronomy in that age. In the late 19th century, the comfortable middle classes - clergymen, lawyers, physicians and retired military officers - took to astronomy as a serious hobby. They formed societies which focused on observation, lectures and discussion, and it was through this medium that women first came to play a significant role in British astronomy. Readership: Undergraduate and postgraduate students studying the history of science or humanities, professional historians of science, engineering and technology, particularly those with an interest in astronomy, the development of astronomical ideas, and scientific instrument-makers, and amateur astronomers. Allan Chapman is a graduate of the University of Lancaster, and he received his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He holds three honorary doctorates from British universities, and was the 2015 Jackson-Gwilt Medallist of the Royal Astronomical Society. He is the author of eleven other books on the history of science and around 200 articles in international academic journals. He teaches in the Faculty of History at Oxford University, is a Member of

Victorian Amateur Astronomer
Victorian Amateur Astronomer

Author: Allan Chapman

Publisher:

Published: 2017-11-27

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 9781781820100

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This is the first book to look in detail at amateur astronomy in Victorian Britain. It deals with the technical issues that were active in Victorian astronomy, and reviews the problems of finance, patronage and the dissemination of scientific ideas, including the relationship between the amateur and the professional in Britain. It contains a wealth of previously unpublished biographical and anecdotal material, and an extended bibliography with notes incorporating much new scholarship. This long-awaited new edition of the Victorian Amateur Astronomer brings Allan Chapman's ground-breaking research on the role of the amateur in the development of astronomy to a new generation. He shows that while on the Continent astronomical research was lavishly supported by the state, in Britain such research was paid for out of the pockets of highly educated, wealthy gentlemen - the so-called 'Grand Amateurs'. It was these powerful individuals who commissioned the telescopes, built the observatories, ran the learned societies, and often stole discoveries from their state-employed colleagues abroad. In addition to the 'Grand Amateurs', Victorian Britain also contained many self-taught amateurs. Although they belonged to no learned societies, these people provide a barometer of the popularity of astronomy in that age. In the late 19th century, the comfortable middle classes - clergymen, lawyers, physicians and retired military officers - took to astronomy as a serious hobby. They formed societies which focused on observation, lectures and discussion, and it was through this medium that women first came to play a significant role in British astronomy. Readership: Undergraduate and postgraduate students studying the history of science or humanities, professional historians of science, engineering and technology, particularly those with an interest in astronomy, the development of astronomical ideas, and scientific instrument-makers, and amateur astronomers. Allan Chapman is a graduate of the University of Lancaster, and he received his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He holds three honorary doctorates from British universities, and was the 2015 Jackson-Gwilt Medallist of the Royal Astronomical Society. He is the author of eleven other books on the history of science and around 200 articles in international academic journals. He teaches in the Faculty of History at Oxford University, is a Member of

The Victorian Amateur Astronomer
The Victorian Amateur Astronomer

Author: Allan Chapman

Publisher:

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13:

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This is the first book to look in detail at amateur astronomy in Victorian Britain. It deals with the technical issues that were active in Victorian astronomy, and reviews the problems of finance, patronage and the dissemination of scientific ideas. It also examines the relationship between the amateur and professional in Britain. It contains a wealth of previously unpublished biographical and anecdotal material, and an extended bibliography with notes incorporating much new scholarship. In The Victorian Amateur Astronomer, Allan Chapman shows that while on the continent astronomical research was lavishly supported by the state, in Britain such research was paid for out of the pockets of highly educated, wealthy gentlemen ? the so-called ?Grand Amateurs?. It was these powerful individuals who commissioned the telescopes, built the observatories, ran the learned societies, and often stole discoveries from their state-employed colleagues abroad. In addition to the ?Grand Amateurs?, Victorian Britain also contained many self-taught amateurs. Although they belonged to no learned societies, these people provide a barometer of the popularity of astronomy in that age. In the late 19th century, the comfortable middle classes ? clergymen, lawyers, physicians and retired military officers ? took to astronomy as a serious hobby. They formed societies which focused on observation, lectures and discussions, and it was through this medium that women first came to play a significant role in British astronomy. Readership: Undergraduate and postgraduate students studying the history of science or humanities, professional historians of science, engineering and technology, particularly those with an interest in astronomy, the development of astronomical ideas, scientific instrument makers, and amateur astronomers.

Dante and the Early Astronomer
Dante and the Early Astronomer

Author: Tracy Daugherty

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0300244975

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Explore the evolution of astronomy from Dante to Einstein, as seen through the eyes of trailblazing Victorian astronomer Mary Acworth Evershed In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867–1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Was Dante’s astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? As the twentieth century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars. From the perspective of one remarkable amateur astronomer, readers will see how ideas developed during Galileo’s time evolved or were discarded in Newtonian conceptions of the cosmos and then recast in Einstein’s theories. The result is a book about the history of science but also a poetic meditation on literature, science, and the evolution of ideas.

Kew Observatory and the Evolution of Victorian Science, 1840–1910
Kew Observatory and the Evolution of Victorian Science, 1840–1910

Author: Lee T. Macdonald

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0822983494

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Kew Observatory was originally built in 1769 for King George III, a keen amateur astronomer, so that he could observe the transit of Venus. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was a world-leading center for four major sciences: geomagnetism, meteorology, solar physics, and standardization. Long before government cutbacks forced its closure in 1980, the observatory was run by both major bodies responsible for the management of science in Britain: first the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and then, from 1871, the Royal Society. Kew Observatory influenced and was influenced by many of the larger developments in the physical sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century, while many of the major figures involved were in some way affiliated with Kew. Lee T. Macdonald explores the extraordinary story of this important scientific institution as it rose to prominence during the Victorian era. His book offers fresh new insights into key historical issues in nineteenth-century science: the patronage of science; relations between science and government; the evolution of the observatory sciences; and the origins and early years of the National Physical Laboratory, once an extension of Kew and now the largest applied physics organization in the United Kingdom.

NightWatch
NightWatch

Author: Terence Dickinson

Publisher: Firefly Books

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1552093026

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A practical guide to viewing the universe.

The Glass Universe
The Glass Universe

Author: Dava Sobel

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2016-12-06

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 069814869X

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From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, the "inspiring" (People), little-known true story of women's landmark contributions to astronomy A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Economist, Smithsonian, Nature, and NPR's Science Friday Nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "A joy to read.” —The Wall Street Journal In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair. Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.

The Astronomer's Chair
The Astronomer's Chair

Author: Omar W. Nasim

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-09-21

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0262045532

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The astronomer’s observing chair as both image and object, and the story it tells about a particular kind of science and a particular view of history. The astronomer’s chair is a leitmotif in the history of astronomy, appearing in hundreds of drawings, prints, and photographs from a variety of sources. Nineteenth-century stargazers in particular seemed eager to display their observing chairs—task-specific, often mechanically adjustable observatory furniture designed for use in conjunction with telescopes. But what message did they mean to send with these images? In The Astronomer’s Chair, Omar W. Nasim considers these specialized chairs as both image and object, offering an original framework for linking visual and material cultures. Observing chairs, Nasim ingeniously argues, showcased and embodied forms of scientific labor, personae, and bodily practice that appealed to bourgeois sensibilities. Viewing image and object as connected parts of moral, epistemic, and visual economies of empire, Nasim shows that nineteenth-century science was represented in terms of comfort and energy, and that “manly” postures of Western astronomers at work in specialized chairs were contrasted pointedly with images of “effete” and cross-legged “Oriental” astronomers. Extending his historical analysis into the twentieth century, Nasim reexamines what he argues to be a famous descendant of the astronomer’s chair: Freud’s psychoanalytic couch, which directed observations not outward toward the stars but inward toward the stratified universe of the psyche. But whether in conjunction with the mind or the heavens, the observing chair was a point of entry designed for specialists that also portrayed widely held assumptions about who merited epistemic access to these realms in the first place. With more than 100 illustrations, many in color; flexibound.

The Great Melbourne Telescope
The Great Melbourne Telescope

Author: Richard Gillespie

Publisher: Museum Victoria

Published: 2011-11-01

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1921833297

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Erected at Melbourne Observatory in 1869, the telescope was the second largest in the world, designed to explore the nature of the nebulae in the southern skies. Richard Gillespie, head of the History and Technology department at the Melbourne museum has written an entertaining account of the telescope’s extraordinary history and tells the story through an amazing cast of characters whose lives intersected with the telescope.

An Anthology of Visual Double Stars
An Anthology of Visual Double Stars

Author: Bob Argyle

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-08-29

Total Pages: 1000

ISBN-13: 1108601707

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Modern telescopes of even modest aperture can show thousands of double stars. Many are faint and unremarkable but hundreds are worth searching out. Veteran double-star observer Bob Argyle and his co-authors take a close-up look at their selection of 175 of the night sky's most interesting double and multiple stars. The history of each system is laid out from the original discovery to what we know at the present time about the stars. Wide-field finder charts are presented for each system along with plots of the apparent orbits and predicted future positions for the orbital systems. Recent measurements of each system are included which will help you to decide whether they can be seen in your telescope, as well as giving advice on the aperture needed. Double star observers of all levels of experience will treasure the level of detail in this guide to these jewels of the night sky.