Timeline of Earth Astronomy
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One complete wobble of the planet takes about 25,800 years.
(NH, 5/96, p.67)
The Earth is 7,930 miles in diameter.
(SFC, 8/7/96, p.A9)
If the Sun were a pumpkin one foot in diameter, Earth would be a pea
about 100 feet away.
(SFEC, 4/30/00, Par p.9)
A measurement of the Earth’s weight in 2000 set it at 5,972 sextillion
tons, or 5,972 plus 18 zeroes.
(SFC, 5/1/00, p.A6)
5,130 Feet = Earth’s deepest known cave (2004) is
the Krubera Cave in Abkhazia.
(SFC, 8/17/04, p.A6)
The Web page of NASA’s Observatorium is:
http://observe.ivv.nasa.gov/observe/ootd/prev/archive.html
The Web page for Earth Viewer is:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/vplanet.html
(Nat. Hist. 3/96, p.11)
4.5Bil BC Our moon formed when an iron-rich,
Mars-sized planet or asteroid plowed into Earth while it was forming.
Much of the iron ended up in the Earth’s core, whereas the cloud of
dust ejected from the impact consolidated into the moon.
(PacDis, Winter ’97, p.28)(Econ, 2/21/09, p.81)
190BCE Hipparchus was born in what is now Turkey. He
calculated the length of a year to within 6 1/2 minutes and was the
first to explain the Earth's rotation on its axis. He also compiled the
first comprehensive catalog of the stars. [see 160-125BCE]
(LAT, 3/30/05)
160-125BCE Hipparchus, Greek mathematician and
astronomer, often called the father of modern astronomy. He attempted
to calculate the distance to the moon and the sun. His estimate for the
distance to the moon was 67r vs. the modern value of 60.267r. He
estimated the sun to be 37 times farther than the moon and at least 12
times greater in diameter than the Earth. His figures were accepted for
17 centuries until the invention of the telescope and precise
astronomical instruments. Together with Ptolemy he graded the visible
stars into six magnitudes. The first magnitude was comprised of about
20 of the brightest stars. He compiled a stellar catalogue in
Alexandria which shows the position of 1080 stars. [see 190BCE]
(SCTS, p.7-8,137,142)
90-168CE Claudius Ptolemy, geographer and mapmaker.
He collected information from travelers and constructed maps of the
then known world. His maps were forgotten as the Roman Empire declined
and were not rediscovered until the early 1400s. Robert Newton in his
book "The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy" (1977), called him "the most
successful fraud in the history of science."
(ATC, p.15)(NH, 6/97, p.43)(LAT, 3/30/05)
128CE The Almagest by Ptolemy,
roughly translated as "the Greatest Compilation," was published around
this time and became one of the most influential scientific texts in
history.
(LAT, 3/30/05)
150CE Ptolemy of Alexandria
published his theory of epicycles, the idea that the moon, the sun and
the planets moved in circles which were moving in circles which were
moving in circles around the Earth.
(Econ, 2/7/04, p.75)
1150 Adelard of Bath (b.1080),
Englishman, died. He had traveled widely and translated the Arabic
version of Euclid's "Elements" into Latin as well as several Arabic
books on astronomy.
(SSFC, 2/8/04, p.M2)
1400-1850 This was a frigid period in Europe and came
to be called the Little Ice Age.
(NG, 7/04, p.28)
1436 Jun 6, Regiomontanus
(Johannes Muller), prepared astronomical tables, was born.
(MC, 6/6/02)
1501 Jul 27, Copernicus was
formally installed as canon of Frauenberg Cathedral.
(MC, 7/27/02)
1506 Copernicus (1473-1543),
Polish-born astronomer, was appointed canon of church properties in the
Prussian diocese of Ermland.
(ON, 2/11, p.5)
1512 Copernicus, Polish-born
astronomer, wrote his manuscript “The Little Commentary,” in which he
suggested that the earth’s apparent immobility was due to a “false
appearance” and a sun-centered cosmos would resolve many astronomical
inconsistencies.
(ON, 2/11, p.5)
1539 German scholar George Joachim
Rheticus received permission to write a condensed version of the ideas
of astronomer Nicholas Copernicus. The short book was titled “First
Account.”
(ON, 2/11, p.6)
1543 May 24, Nicolaus Copernicus,
astronomer, died in Poland. His book, "On the Revolutions of the
Heavenly Orbs," (De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium), proof of a
sun-centered universe, was printed just before he died. Although he did
say that the earth rotated once a day and did revolve around the sun
once a year, he kept 2 features of the old Aristotelian system: one
involved uniform circular motion, and the other was quintessential
matter, for which such motion was said to be natural. In 1916 the
Catholic clergy placed the book on its “Index of Prohibited Books.” In
2004 Owen Gingerich authored "The Book Nobody Read," an examination of
how the ideas of Copernicus spread. In 2006 William T. Vollmann
authored “Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and The Revolutions of the
Heavenly Spheres.” In 2008 his remains, buried in a Roman Catholic
Cathedral in Frombork, Poland, were positively identified using DNA
evidence.
(NG, 3/1990, p. 117)(WSJ, 3/5/04, p.W8)(NH,
4/1/04, p.66)(SSFC, 2/5/06, p.M1)(AP, 11/20/08)
1555 May 25, Gemma Frisius (46),
Frisian geographer, astronomer, died.
(SC, 5/25/02)
1560 Aug 21, Tycho Brahe
(1546-1601) became interested in astronomy.
(SC, 8/21/02)
1575 Jul 25, Christoph Scheiner,
astronomer, was born in Germany.
(SC, 7/25/02)
1595 Jul 9, Johannes Kepler
inscribed a geometric solid construction of universe.
(MC, 7/9/02)
1595 Aug 24, Thomas Digges,
English astronomer (Universe Infinite), died.
(MC, 8/24/02)
1611 Apr 14, Word "telescope" was
1st used by Prince Federico Cesi.
(MC, 4/14/02)
1616 Mar 5, The Catholic Church’s
Congregation of the Index banned Catholics from reading “On the
Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres” (1543) by Nicholas Copernicus. “De
Revolutionibus” was not formally banned but merely withdrawn from
circulation, pending "corrections." The prohibition was officially
lifted in 1835.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_revolutionibus_orbium_coelestium)
1616 Galileo was forbidden from
continuing his scientific work by the Roman Catholic Church.
(NG, March 1990, p. 117)
1618 Mar 8, Johannes Kepler came
up with his Third Law of Planetary Motion.
(SFC, 6/16/96, PM p.5)(HN, 3/8/98)
1618 May 15, Johannes Kepler
discovered his harmonics law.
(HN, 5/15/98)
1620 Jul 21, Jean Picard, French
astronomer, was born.
(MC, 7/21/02)
1620 Aug 7, Kepler's mother was
arrested for witchcraft.
(MC, 8/7/02)
1629 Apr 14, Christian Huygens
(d.1695), Dutch astronomer, discoverer of Saturn's rings, was born. He
invented the pendulum and along with Newton showed that any body
revolving around a center is actually accelerating constantly toward
that center, even though the rate of rotation remains constant.
(TNG, Klein, p.30)(HN, 4/14/99)
1633 Jun 22, Galileo Galilei was
again forced by the Pope to recant that the Earth orbits the Sun. On
Oct 31, 1992, the Vatican admitted it was wrong.
(MC, 6/22/02)
1642 Jan 8, Astronomer Galileo
Galilei (77) died in Arcetri, Italy. Galileo had 2 daughters consigned
to a nunnery and one son, whom he got married into a rich Florentine
family. In 1614, Father Tommaso Caccini denounced the opinions of
Galileo on the motion of the Earth from the pulpit of Santa Maria
Novella, judging them to be erroneous. Galileo went to Rome and
defended himself against charges that had been made against him. In
1616, he was admonished by Cardinal Bellarmino and told that he could
not defend Copernican astronomy because it went against the doctrine of
the Church. Later, in 1632 he was summoned by the Holy Office to Rome.
The tribunal passed a sentence condemning him and compelled Galileo to
solemnly abjure his theory. He was sent to exile in Siena.
Galileo spent his last years almost totally blind and poor. In 1999
Dava Sobel published "Galileo's Daughter."
(BHT, Hawking, p.180)(AP, 1/8/98)(WSJ, 10/19/99,
p.A24)(MC, 1/8/02)
1645-1715 The Maunder Minimum. A 70-year period,
named after astronomer E.W. Maunder, who documented a lack of solar
activity during this time. It also marked the coldest period of the
"Little Ice Age" that gripped Europe from c1450-c1890.
(SFC, 11/29/02, p.J6)(SFC, 12/8/03, p.A2)
1673 Jul 24, Edmund Halley entered
Queen's College, Oxford, as an undergraduate.
(MC, 7/24/02)
1695 Jul 8, Christian Huygens
(66), Dutch inventor, astronomer, died. He generally wrote his name as
Christiaan Hugens, and it is also sometimes written as Huyghens. In his
book “Cosmotheros,” published in 1698, he speculated on life on other
planets.
(http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_huygens.htm)
1713 Mar 15, Nicolas Louis de
Lacaille, astronomer who mapped the Southern Hemisphere, was born.
(MC, 3/15/02)
1715 May 3, Edmund Halley observed
a total eclipse phenomenon: "Baily's Beads."
(MC, 5/3/02)
1729 James Bradley discovered the
aberration of starlight, an apparent shift in the position of a star
caused by the finite speed of light and the motion of the Earth in
orbit around the Sun. He uses this to determine the speed of light to
be 308,3 00 km/sec, remarkably close to the modern value of 299,792
km/sec.
(http://inkido.indiana.edu/a100/timeline3.html)
1749 Mar 23, Pierre-Simon Laplace
(d.1827), French mathematician, astronomer, physicist, was born. He
wrote the 5-volume work “Celestial Mechanics.” In 1998 Charles Couiston
Gillespie published his biography “Pierre-Simon Laplace: A Life in
Exact Science.”
(WSJ, 2/19/98, p.A20)(SS, 3/23/02)
1786 Apr 20, John Goodricke (21),
English deaf and dumb astronomer, died.
(MC, 4/20/02)
1822 Aug 25, F. William Herschel
(85), German astronomer (discovered Uranus), died.
(MC, 8/25/02)
1835 The Vatican removed “On the
Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres” (1543) by Nicholas Copernicus from
its list of banned books.
(www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7134341.ece)
1839 Sep 9, John Herschel
(1792-1871), English astronomer, took the 1st glass plate photograph.
(www.getty.edu)
1851 Nov
11, Alvan Clark of Cambridge, Massachusetts, patented a telescope.
Clark, a portrait painter interested in astronomy, had made several
small lenses and mirrors as a hobby. The fact that he could detect the
small residual errors in one of the best lenses Europe could offer
convinced him that he could make them as well. After he gained a
reputation in Europe the American orders started to come in. The Alvin
Clark Company became one of the foremost producers of some of the
largest lenses for telescopes in the 1800's.
(www.todayinsci.com/)
1855 Mar 13, Percival Lowell
(d.1916), astronomer, was born. He predicted the discovery of the
planet Pluto. He also wrote “The Soul of the Far East” and “Occult
Japan.” He predicted the existence of a planet behind Neptune before
Pluto was discovered by Tombaugh in 1930.
(NH, 12/96, p.22)(HN, 3/13/99)
1851 Jan 6, Leon Foucault
(d.1868), French scientist, watched a pendulum swing and shift its
plane of motion. This he realized was due to the rotation of the Earth.
In 2003 Amir D. Aczel authored "Pendulum: Leon Foucault and the Triumph
of Science."
(WSJ, 8/28/03, p.D18)
1864 May 29, A.H. Borgesius, Dutch
amateur astronomer, was born.
(SC, 5/29/02)
1867 Jun 11, Charles Fabry, found
ozone layer in upper atmosphere, was born.
(SC, 6/11/02)
1867 Oct
31, William Parson (b.1800), 3rd Earl of Rosse and maker of large
telescopes, died. Parsons, an Irish astronomer, built the largest
reflecting telescope of the 19th century. He learned to polish metal
mirrors (1827) and spent the next few years building a 36-inch
telescope. He later completed a giant 72-inch telescope (1845) which he
named "Leviathan," It remained the largest ever built until decades
after his death. He was the first to resolve the spiral shape of
objects, previously seen as only clouds, which were much later
identified as galaxies independent of our own Milky Way galaxy and
millions of light-years away. His first such sighting was made in 1845,
and by 1850 he had discovered 13 more. In 1848, he found and named the
Crab Nebula (he thought it resembled a crab), by which name it is still
known.
(www.todayinsci.com)
1885 May 29, Erwin F.
Finlay-Freundlich, British astronomer, was born.
(SC, 5/29/02)
1887 Albert Michelson and Edward
Morley compared the speed of light in the direction of earth’s orbit
with the speed of light at right angles to earth’s motion and found it
is the same.
(BHT, Hawking, p.20)
1894 Jul 17, Georges Lemaitre,
Belgian astronomer, was born.
(HN, 7/17/01)
1906 Apr 28, Bartholomeus J "Bart"
Bok, Dutch-US astronomer (Milky Way), was born.
(MC, 4/28/02)
1922 Sep 13, In El Azizia, Libya,
a temperature of 136 degrees Fahrenheit (57.8 Celsius) was the hottest
ever measured on Earth.
(MC, 9/13/01)(AP, 7/23/03)
1926 Feb 19, Dr. Lane of Princeton
estimated the earth’s age at one billion years.
(HN, 2/19/98)
1930 May 10, The 1st US
planetarium opened in Chicago.
(MC, 5/10/02)
1934 Mar 9, Uri Gregarin (Yuri
Gagarin), first man to orbit the Earth, was born.
(HN, 3/9/99)
1934 Dec 2, The 5.08-m (200") Mt.
Palomar Observatory mirror was cast.
(MC, 12/2/01)
1947 Jun 24, Flying saucers were
"sighted" over Mount Rainier by pilot Ken Arnold.
(MC, 6/24/02)
1947 Jul 2, An object crashed near
Roswell, N.M. The Army Air Force later insisted it was a weather
balloon, but eyewitness accounts gave rise to speculation it might have
been an alien spacecraft.
(AP, 7/2/97)
1947 Nov 19, A 200" mirror arrived
at Mt. Palomar observatory.
(MC, 11/19/01)
1948 Jun 3, The 200-inch
reflecting telescope at the Palomar Mountain Observatory in California
was dedicated. The nearly 5.1 meter Hale telescope was operated by
Caltech.
(AP, 6/3/97)(SFEC, 4/23/00, p.C14)
1949 Feb 1, The 200" (5.08-m) Hale
telescope was 1st used.
(MC, 2/1/02)
1955 Nov 3, An Alabama woman was
bruised by a meteor.
(MC, 11/3/01)
1967 Oct 10, The Outer Space
Treaty, which prohibits the placing of weapons of mass destruction on
the moon or elsewhere in space, entered into force.
(AP, 10/10/07)
1959 Jan 22, USAF concluded that
less than 1% of UFO's are unknown objects.
(MC, 1/22/02)
1959 Feb 17, The U.S. launched its
first weather station in space, Vanguard II weighing 9.8 kg.
(HN, 2/17/98)(MC, 2/17/02)
1959 Aug 7, The United States
launched Explorer 6, which sent back a picture of the Earth. The
satellite, popularly known as the "paddlewheel satellite," featured a
photocell scanner that transmitted a crude picture of the earth's
surface and cloud cover from a distance of 17,000 miles
(HFA, '96, p.36)(AP, 8/7/97)(MC, 8/7/02)
1965 Apr 6, The
United States launched the Intelsat I, also known as the "Early Bird"
communications satellite.
(AP, 4/6/08)
1966 Nov 17, The Leonid meteor
shower peaked at 150,000+ per hour.
(MC, 11/17/01)
1967 Jan 27, The US signed the
Outer Space Treaty with Russia. More than 60 nations signed a treaty
banning the orbiting of nuclear weapons. All weapons of mass
destruction were banned from orbit, as was military activity on the
moon and other celestial bodies.
(SFC, 1/28/67, p.A1)(AP, 1/27/98)(SSFC, 7/15/07,
p.D1)
1968 Oct 11, Apollo 7, The first
manned Apollo mission, was launched from Cape Kennedy with astronauts
Wally Schirra, Donn Fulton Eisele and R. Walter Cunningham aboard. It
made 163 orbits in 260 hours.
(AP,
10/11/97)(www.apollomissionphotos.com/index_AP7.html)
1968 John Dobson (53), inventor of
the low cost Dobsonian telescope, founded the Sidewalk Astronomers.
(WSJ, 9/1/04, p.AD10)
1969 May 10, Apollo 10 transmitted
the 1st color pictures of Earth from space.
(MC, 5/10/02)
1972 Aug 21, The US orbiting
astronomy observatory Copernicus was launched.
(http://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=6153)
1974 Feb 8, The three-man crew of
"Skylab" space station returned to Earth after spending 84 days in
space.
(AP, 2/8/99)
1979 Jul 11, The abandoned U.S.
space station Skylab made a spectacular return to Earth, burning up in
the atmosphere and showering debris over the Indian Ocean and Western
Australia.
(AP, 7/11/97)(SFC, 6/3/00, p.A6)
1983 Jul 21, The coldest
temperature ever measured on Earth was -129 Fahrenheit (-89 Celsius) at
Vostok, Antarctica.
(AP, 7/23/03)
1990 The Cosmic Background
Explorer satellite (COBE) proved that cosmic radiation formed a perfect
“blackbody” spectrum, which was expected if the universe was once
jammed into a very dense state.
(WSJ, 6/28/01, p.A1)
1991 Apr 5, NASA launched the $670
million Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. It was directed to a suicide
plunge in 2000.
(SFC, 3/24/00, p.A5)(SFC, 6/3/00, p.A6)
1991 Sep 18, The Upper Atmosphere
Research Satellite was deployed from the space shuttle Discovery. It
measured the ozone hole for the next decade. Operations of the
satellite ceased in 2001 due to NASA economics.
(SFC, 8/24/01, p.A13)
1992 Oct 9, A great meteorite was
seen from Kentucky to NY.
(MC, 10/9/01)
1996 Jul 17, Scientists discovered
that the Earth’s solid-iron core rotates 12 miles a year faster than
the liquid-iron outer core. The inner core grows about an inch in
radius every 50 years. A report was published in Nature.
(WSJ, 7/18/96, p.A1)(SFC, 7/18/96, p.A6)
1996 Feb, NASA launched a
spacecraft to study the asteroid 433 Eros. Project Near Earth Asteroid
Rendezvous (NEAR) was part of the Discovery program.
(SFC, 1/4/99, p.A2)
1996 Jul 17, Scientists discovered
that the earth’s solid-iron core rotates 12 miles a year faster than
the liquid-iron outer core. The inner core grows about an inch in
radius every 50 years. A report was published in Nature.
(WSJ, 7/18/96, p.A1)(SFC, 7/18/96, p.A6)
1998 Mar 26, In Nevada a new
satellite-based survey of the Yucca Mountain site for storing
radioactive wastes indicated that the Earth’s crust at the site was
stretching 10 times faster than previous studies have shown.
(SFC, 3/27/98, p.A3)
1998 Nov 17, The Leonid
meter storm was expected to peak and damage was feared to the nearly
500 satellites in orbit. The storm was the result of the Earth’s
intersection with the debris field of the comet Tempel-Tuttle, last
seen 33 years ago.
(SFC, 4/28/98, p.A5)(WSJ, 8/28/98, p.A1)(SFEC,
10/4/98, p.A11)
1999 Feb 4, Russian astronauts on
Mir planned to deploy a fan-like mirror made of plastic and coated with
aluminum for an 18 hour test.
(SFEC, 1/31/99, p.A23)
2000 Jan 12, Scientists reported
that the temperature of the Earth's surface had risen 0.7-1.4 degrees
Fahrenheit over the past century and that the Earth has been warming
for the past 300 years.
(SFC, 1/13/00, p.A7)
2000 Jun 4, NASA directed the $670
million crippled Compton Gamma Ray Observatory into a suicide plunge
into the Pacific Ocean in a controlled re-entry to avoid debris over
populated areas.
(SFC, 3/24/00, p.A5)(SFC, 6/3/00, p.A6)
2001 Feb 12, The $224 million
NEAR-Shoemaker probe was scheduled to end its mission with a landing on
the Eros asteroid. The probe completed a 5 year voyage with a
successful landing and continued sending signals.
(SFC, 1/9/01, p.A4)(SFC, 2/13/01, p.A1)
2002 Jun 21, Scientist reported
that an asteroid (2002 MN) the size of a soccer field whizzed by Earth
on June 14 at a distance of 75,000 miles, a third of the distance to
the Moon, the biggest such space rock in decades to get this close.
(Reuters, 6/21/02)(SFC, 6/21/02, p.A6)
2002 Jul 2, Steve Fossett became
the 1st person to fly a balloon solo around the world. On his 6th
attempt he completed the journey in 13 days, 12 hours, 16 minutes and
13 seconds. He departed from Australia Jun 19 and covered an estimated
19,428 miles.
(SFC, 7/3/02, p.A3)
2002 The EU decided to go ahead
and launch a satellite navigation network, Galileo, to rival America's
Global Positioning System (GPS). Operations were scheduled to begin in
2008.
(Econ, 1/31/04, p.78)
2002 The Japanese Institute of
space and Astronautical Sciences (ISAS) planned to launch its Muses-C
to bring asteroid samples back to Earth.
(SFC, 7/4/98, p.A10)
2003 Oct 29, A powerful
geomagnetic storm walloped the Earth, knocking out some airline
communications but apparently causing no large power outages or other
major problems.
(AP, 10/29/04)
2003 Dec 17, UC and Cal Tech
received 2 grants totaling $35 million to design the world's most
powerful telescope, a 30-meter telescope (TMT) to be built on a yet to
be chosen mountaintop.
(SFC, 12/18/03, p.A23)
2004 Mar 18, A 100-foot diameter
asteroid passed within 26,500 miles of Earth, the closest-ever brush on
record by a space rock.
(AP, 3/18/04)
2004 May 13, It was reported that
scientists had recorded as much as a 10% drop in the amount of sunshine
reaching Earth since the 1950s, likely due to atmospheric pollution.
(SFC, 5/13/04, p.A1)
2004 Aug, A team of Croatian
cavers descended 1,693 feet to Earth’s deepest know hole in the Velebit
Mountains of Croatia.
(SFC, 8/17/04, p.A6)
2007 Nov 1, A project called “The
Deep Carbon Observatory,” a multidisciplinary, international initiative
dedicated to achieving a transformational understanding of Earth's deep
carbon cycle, received funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
(Econ, 2/26/11,
p.86)(https://dco.gl.ciw.edu/about/history)
2009 Feb 10, The first-ever
collision between two satellites occurred over Siberia when a derelict
Russian military communications satellite, Cosmos 2251, crossed paths
with a US Iridium satellite.
(AP, 2/12/09)(Econ, 8/21/10, p.65)
2010 Apr 22, The US National
Research Council released a study that found the level of acid in
oceans increasing by 30% since the start of the Industrial Revolution,
some 200 years ago. This came on the 40th observance of Earth Day.
(SFC, 4/23/10, p.A16)
2010 Sep 29, A Russian firm
announced an ambitious bid to fill the vacuum in the space tourism
market by stationing an orbiting hotel in the cosmos. Orbital
Technologies wants to launch a seven-room station by 2016 but may
increase or decrease that capacity based on customer demand.
(AP, 9/29/10)
2011 Tim Flannery authored “Her on
Earth: A natural History of the Planet.”
(Econ, 3/5/11, p.90)
End of file