Browse Items (1664 total)

The Pleiades star cluster is located in the constellation Taurus. Also known as the Seven Sisters or M45, this group of stars is most visible in November when they can be seen from dusk until dawn. The name probably derives from the Ancient Greek…

Edward Emerson Barnard’s discovery of the fifth satellite of Jupiter in 1892 set off a firestorm of accolades in the press and in astronomy circles. It was the first planetary satellite discovery since Asaph Hall had discovered the moons of Mars in…

Shown here is an example visualization from Vanderbilt's Filtergraph tool applied to Hipparcos spacecraft data. Depicted is a so-called Hertzsprung-Russel diagram showing the relationships between stellar temperatures, luminosities, and sizes, and…

With the observations in this manuscript, Tycho Brahe refuted the Aristotelian belief in an unchanging celestial realm. His precise measurements indicated that "new stars," stellae novae, were not tailless comets in the atmosphere as previously…

This is a facsimile of the copy of Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo, originally written in 1610. In it, Galileo published his discovery of four "Medicean Stars" (now known as the Galilean Moons of Jupiter). It also has Galileo's drawings of the moon,…

In 1577, Tycho Brahe, the Dane, witnessed a comet. Brahe was one of the last great naked-eye observers of celestial objects and one of the first to understand the necessity of rigorous scheduling and documenting of observations. He also argued that…

This book describes the astronomical, and hence, calendrical, understanding of the Maya.

This book on the moon's rotation includes information about astronomical models.

An altazimuth is a telescope designed to measure the altitude and azimuth of a star in order to fix its position in the night sky. The instrument is designed to move vertically to measure altitude (height), and to move horizontally to measure the…