Astronomy Books

"In his [ Ptolemy's ] planetary theory... in general the agreement between theory and observation was spoilt by the necessity of making all the orbital planes pass through the center of the earth, instead of the sun, thus making a good accordance practically impossible."

"No advance was made in theoretical astronomy for 260 years, the interval between Hipparchus and Ptolemy of Alexandria."

"Hipparchus... noted the irregular motion of the sun, and, to explain it, assumed that it revolved uniformly not exactly about the earth but about a point some distance away, called the “excentric”. The same result he could obtain by assuming that the sun moved round a small circle, whose center described a larger circle about the earth; this larger circle carrying the other was called the “deferent”: so that the actual motion of the sun was in an epicycle. He... discovered the Precession of the Equinoxes."

"Aristarchus of Samos seems to have been the first to suggest that the planets revolved not about the earth but about the sun, but the idea seemed so improbable that it was hardly noticed, especially as Aristarchus himself did not expand it into a treatise."

"It may be regarded as counting in Aristotle’s favour that he did consider the earth to be a sphere and not a flat disc, but he seems to have thought that the mathematical spheres of Eudoxus had a real solid existence, and that not only meteors, shooting stars and aurora, but also comets and the milky way belong to the atmosphere."

"Eudoxus of Cnidus, endeavouring to account for the fact that the planets, during every apparent revolution round the earth, come to rest twice, and in the shorter interval between these “stationary points,” move in the opposite direction, found that he could represent the phenomena fairly well by a system of concentric spheres, each rotating with its own velocity, and carrying its own particular planet round its own equator, the outermost sphere carrying the fixed stars. ...the total number required by Aristotle reaching fifty-five."

"On 11th November, 1572, Tycho noticed an unfamiliar bright star in the constellation of Cassiopeia, and continued to observe it with a sextant. It was a very brilliant object, equal to Venus at its brightest for the rest of November, not falling below the first magnitude for another four months, and remaining visible for more than a year afterwards."

"Some of the Pythagoreans, if not Pythagoras himself, held that the earth is a sphere, and that the apparent daily revolution of the sun and stars is really due to a motion of the earth, though at first this motion of the earth was not supposed to be one of rotation about an axis."

"In 1568 Tycho left Rostock, and matriculated at Basle, but soon moved on to Augsburg, where he found more enthusiasm for astronomy, and induced one of his new friends to order the construction of a large 19-foot quadrant of heavy oak beams. This was the first of the series of great instruments associated with Tycho’s name, and it remained in use for five years, being destroyed by a great storm in 1574."

"He matriculated at Rostock, where he found little astronomy but a good deal of astrology. While there he fought a duel in the dark and lost part of his nose, which he replaced by a composition of gold and silver."

"He provided himself with a cross-staff for determining the angular distance between stars or other objects, and, finding the divisions of the scale inaccurate, constructed a table of corrections, an improvement that seems to have been a decided innovation, the previous practice having been to use the best available instrument and ignore its errors."

"He obtained the Alphonsine and the new Prutenic Tables, but soon found that the latter, though more accurate than the former, failed to represent the true positions of the planets, and grasped the fact that continuous observation was essential in order to determine the true motions."

"On 21st August, 1560, however, a solar eclipse took place, total in Portugal, and therefore of small proportions in Denmark, and Tycho’s keen interest was awakened, not so much by the phenomenon, as by the fact that it had occurred according to prediction. Soon afterwards he purchased an edition of Ptolemy in order to read up the subject of astronomy, to which, and to mathematics, he devoted most of the remainder of his three years’ course at Copenhagen."

"Of noble family, born a twin on 14th December, 1546, at Knudstrup in Scania (the southernmost part of Sweden, then forming part of the kingdom of Denmark), Tycho was kidnapped a year later by a childless uncle. This uncle brought him up as his own son, provided him at the age of seven with a tutor, and sent him in 1559 to the University of Copenhagen, to study for a political career by taking courses in rhetoric and philosophy."

"The age following that of Copernicus produced three outstanding figures associated with the science of astronomy, then reaching the close of what Professor Forbes so aptly styles the geometrical period. These three Sir David Brewster has termed “Martyrs of Science”; Galileo, the great Italian philosopher, has his own place among the “Pioneers of Science”; and invaluable though Tycho Brahe’s work was, the latter can hardly be claimed as a pioneer in the same sense as the other two. Nevertheless, Kepler, the third member of the trio, could not have made his most valuable discoveries without Tycho’s observations."

"About the same time Kepler had married a lady already twice widowed, and become involved in difficulties with her relatives on financial grounds, and with the Styrian authorities in connection with the religious disputes then coming to a head. On account of these latter he thought it expedient, the year after his marriage, to withdraw to Hungary, from whence he sent short treatises to Tübingen, “On the magnet” (following the ideas of Gilbert of Colchester), “On the cause of the obliquity of the ecliptic” and “On the Divine wisdom as shown in the Creation”."

"Another copy of the book Kepler sent to Reymers the Imperial astronomer with a most fulsome letter, which Tycho, who asserted that Reymers had simply plagiarised his work, very strongly resented, thus drawing from Kepler a long letter of apology."

"He sent copies of his book [Mysterium Cosmographicum] to several leading astronomers, of whom Galileo praised his ingenuity and good faith, while Tycho Brahe was evidently much struck with the work and advised him to adapt something similar to the Tychonic system instead of the Copernican. He also intimated that his Uraniborg observations would provide more accurate determinations of the planetary orbits, and thus made Kepler eager to visit him."

"The next subject... dealt with the relation between the distances of the planets and their times of revolution round the sun. It was obvious that the period was not simply proportional to the distance, as the outer planets were all too slow for this, and he concluded “either that the moving intelligences of the planets are weakest in those that are farthest from the sun, or that there is one moving intelligence in the sun, the common centre, forcing them all round, but those most violently which are nearest, and that it languishes in some sort and grows weaker at the most distant, because of the remoteness and the attenuation of the virtue”. This is not so near a guess at the theory of gravitation as might be supposed, for Kepler imagined that a repulsive force was necessary to account for the planets being sometimes further from the sun, and so laid aside the idea of a constant attractive force."

"He admitted that a certain thickness must be assigned to the intervening spheres to cover the greatest and least distances of the several planets from the sun, but even then some of the numbers obtained are not a very close fit for the corresponding planetary orbits. Kepler’s own suggested explanation of the discordances was that they must be due to erroneous measures of the planetary distances, and this, in those days of crude and infrequent observations, could not easily be disproved."

"The actual planets moreover were not even six but only five, so far as he knew, so he next pondered the question of what sort of things these could be of which only five different figures were possible and suddenly thought of the five regular solids. He immediately pounced upon this idea and ultimately evolved the following scheme. “The earth is the sphere, the measure of all; round it describe a dodecahedron; the sphere including this will be Mars. Round Mars describe a tetrahedron; the sphere including this will be Jupiter. Describe a cube round Jupiter; the sphere including this will be Saturn. Now, inscribe in the earth an icosahedron, the sphere inscribed in it will be Venus: inscribe an octahedron in Venus: the circle inscribed in it will be Mercury.” With this result Kepler was inordinately pleased, and regretted not a moment of the time spent in obtaining it, though to us this “Mysterium Cosmographicum” can only appear useless, even without the more recent additions to the known planets."

"He was nevertheless unwilling to adopt the opinion of Rheticus that the number six was sacred, maintaining that the “sacredness” of the number was of much more recent date than the creation of the worlds, and could not therefore account for it."

"Following his tutor in his admiration for the Copernican theory, he [ Kepler ] wrote an essay on the primary motion, attributing it to the rotation of the earth, and this not for the mathematical reasons brought forward by Copernicus, but, as he himself says, on physical or metaphysical grounds."

"His astronomical tutor, Maestlin, encouraged him to devote himself to his newly adopted science, and the first result of this advice appeared before very long in Kepler’s “Mysterium Cosmographicum”. The bent of his mind was towards philosophical speculation, to which he had been attracted in his youthful studies of Scaliger’s “Exoteric Exercises” (Exotericarum exercitationum). He says he devoted much time “to the examination of the nature of heaven, of souls, of genii, of the elements, of the essence of fire, of the cause of fountains, the ebb and flow of the tides, the shape of the continents and inland seas, and things of this sort.”"

"On 21st December, 1571, at Weil in the Duchy of Wurtemberg, was born a weak and sickly seven-months’ child, to whom his parents Henry and Catherine Kepler gave the name of John. Henry Kepler was a petty officer in the service of the reigning Duke, and in 1576 joined the army serving in the Netherlands. His wife followed him, leaving her young son in his grandfather’s care at Leonberg, where he barely recovered from a severe attack of smallpox. It was from this place that John derived the Latinised name of Leonmontanus."

"The doctrine of Copernicus was destined very soon to divide others besides the Lutheran leaders. The leaven of inquiry was working, and not long after the death of Copernicus real advances were to come, first in the accuracy of observations, and, as a necessary result of these, in the planetary theory itself."

"In comparison with the question of the motion of the earth, no other astronomical detail of the time seems to be of much consequence. Comets, such as from time to time appeared, bright enough for naked eye observation, were still regarded as atmospheric phenomena, and their principal interest, as well as that of eclipses and planetary conjunctions, was in relation to astrology."

"With all its defects, partly due to reliance on bad observations, the work [ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ] showed a great advance in the interpretation of the motions of the planets; and his determinations of the periods both in relation to the earth and to the stars were adopted by Reinhold, Professor of Astronomy at Wittenberg, for the new Prutenic or Prussian Tables, which were to supersede the obsolete Alphonsine Tables of the thirteenth century."

"According to Copernicus the earth is only a planet like the others, and not even the biggest one, while the sun is the most important body in the system, and the stars probably too far away for any motion of the earth to affect their apparent places. ...He shows that the revolution of the earth will account for the seasons, and for the stationary points and retrograde motions of the planets. He corrects definitely the order of the planets outwards from the sun, a matter which had been in dispute. A notable defect is due to the idea that a body can only revolve about another body or a point, as if rigidly connected with it, so that, in order to keep the earth’s axis in a constant direction in space, he has to invent a third motion."

"Luther, with his obstinate conviction of the verbal accuracy of the Scriptures, rejected as mere folly the idea of a moving earth, and Melanchthon thought such opinions should be prohibited, but Rheticus, a professor at the Protestant University of Wittenberg and an enthusiastic pupil of Copernicus, urged publication, and undertook to see the work through the press. This, however, he was unable to complete and another Lutheran, Osiander, to whom he entrusted it, wrote a preface, with the apparent intention of disarming opposition, in which he stated that the principles laid down were only abstract hypotheses convenient for purposes of calculation. This unauthorized interpolation may have had its share in postponing the prohibition of the book by the Church of Rome."

"The old geocentric system once shaken, the way was gradually smoothed for the heliocentric system, which Copernicus, still hampered by tradition, did not quite reach. He was hardly a practical astronomer in the observational sense. His first recorded observation, of an occultation of Aldebaran, was made in 1497, and he is not known to have made as many as fifty astronomical observations, while, of the few he did make and use, at least one was more than half a degree in error, which would have been intolerable to such an observer as Hipparchus."

"It is rather an exaggeration to call the present accepted system the Copernican system, as it is really due to Kepler, half a century after the death of Copernicus, but much credit is due to the latter for his successful attempt to provide a real alternative for the Ptolemaic system, instead of tinkering with it."

"His [ Copernicus' ] considerations were almost entirely mathematical, his only invasion into physics being in defense of the “moving earth” against the stock objection that if the earth moved, loose objects would fly off, and towers fall. He did not break sufficiently away from the old tradition of uniform circular motion. ...he would not sacrifice the old fetish, and so, the orbit of the earth being clearly not circular with respect to the sun, he made all his planetary planes pass through the center of the earth’s orbit, instead of through the sun, thus handicapping himself in the same way though not in the same degree as Ptolemy. His thirty-four circles or epicycles comprised four for the earth, three for the moon, seven for Mercury (on account of his highly eccentric orbit) and five each for the other planets."