In his career he was elected leader of several international astronomical groups. He received numerous awards, including the important Vetlesen Prize in 1966 from Columbia University. Oort's early studies, under his teacher Jacobus Kapteyn, made him familiar with Kapteyn's celestial model, which placed the sun at the center of a relatively small galaxy. In 1917, however, Harlow Shapley challenged Kapteyn's model, proposing a far bigger one. Oort's first major scientific achievement was to provide observational evidence that confirmed the main features of Shapley's model.
Johannes Kepler was forced to leave his teaching post at Graz due to the Counter Reformation because he was Lutheran and moved to Prague to work with the renowned Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. He learned Tycho's post as Imperial Mathematician when Tycho died in 1601. Using the precise data that Tycho had collected, Kepler discovered that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse. In 1609 he published "Astronomia Nova", showing his discoveries, which are now called Kepler's first two laws of planetary motion. And what is just as important about this work, "it is the first published account where a scientist documents how he has coped with the multitude of imperfect data to forge a theory of surpassing accuracy" , a fundamental law of nature.
Today, we know that stars are born from interstellar gas clouds, shine by nuclear fusion and then die, sometimes in dramatic ways. This paper will discuss the life cycle of stars, but to have a better understanding of the life cycle of stars we first need to understand their birth. Since we were children, we have been curious about those little lights in the night sky that seem to twinkle in the darkness. We even sang about them growing up, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are? As a child, we could not understand the magnificent miracle that takes place for a star to be born.
The Geology of the Moon Approximately 4.5 billion years ago a large asteroid struck Earth and thus resulted in the Moon. This impact theory suggests that the collision ejected raw materials which in time became the Moon. With the Moon having no significant atmosphere, it can reserve a good record of the impact history. This information can provide geologists with clues to the history of the Earth. The crust of the Moon is composed of a variation of primary elements, including uranium, oxygen, thorium, potassium, silicon, magnesium, iron, titanium, calcium, aluminum and hydrogen.
His Work * First major work: Mysterium Cosmographicum- published as a defence for the Copernican system. This was in Graz, and there he had an epiphany and eventually managed to figure out the relative size of each planets (only 6 known at that time) orbit path, while also finding a formula relating the size of a planet to its orbit time, but he rejected it later as he believed it was not precise enough. * He was the first person to investigate the formation of pictures with a pinhole camera * First to correctly explain planetary motion * Became founder of celestial mechanics * First to explain process of vision by refraction, and the use of both eyes for depth perception * First to formulate glasses for near-sightedness and farsightedness * First to explain principles of how a telescope worked Planetary Motion * Task set be another famous
The Maya Civilization and Astronomy The Maya civilization is characterized of being one of the biggest and wisest civilizations of history, who were known of having the only known fully developed written language of pre-Columbian America, and the most advanced Mathematicians and Astronomers. They were mostly characterized for being extraordinary good astronomers who were experts on making observations and recording the motion of the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. Maya’s primary interests were Zenial Passages, when the Sun crossed over Maya latitudes. They were based on an annual basis where the sun travels to its summer solstice at latitude of 23-1/3 degrees north. Since most of the Maya cities were located south, they were able to observe the sun directly overhead while the sun was passing over their latitude.
An 1894 article proposed the idea of a fully metal aircraft, and in 1895, he turned his eyes toward settling space. In 1903, his manuscript "Exploration of the World Space with Reaction Machines" was published in Nauchnoe Obozrenie magazine. This and his follow-up articles are regarded as the world's first scientifically viable proposals to explore outer space with rockets. Tsiolkovsky's rockets were fuelled by a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, the same mix used on the space shuttle, though hydrogen had only been liquefied for the first time in 1898. His manuscript included the equation now named for the scientist.
Mercury is the innermost and smallest planet as well as having the most eccentric orbit the eight planets in our Solar System. Mercury’s terrain is rocky and heavily cratered closely resembling Earth’s moon, having no atmospheric protection against meteoroids or debris colliding with the surface, causing huge dents. The outer crust of mercury is believed to be very thin, much thinner than earths, its shell only being 500 to 600 km thick. It has been found that Mercury is the second densest planet of our solar system, earth being the first. It has a metallic core which makes up 75% of the planets radius.
This paper will attempt to find out who actually was more important to the history of astronomy of these four astronomers. Apollinarius was among the most prominent Greek astronomers of the time immediately preceding Ptolemy and his chief contributions were in lunar theory. Not much of his work or writings survived or is even known by title although one specimen of Apollinarius’s survived. This was a passage of about 500 words quoted in a fragment of an anonymous commentary on Ptolemy’s Handy Tables, composed in the early third century CE and was preserved in a medieval astrological manuscript. This passage explains about the periodicities with the Moon, and explains how the moon’s motion in latitude, reckoned as its progress in the plane of its orbit relative to the nodal line.
The earth’s atmosphere was limiting how far we could see into space, so astronomers decided to bypass the atmosphere. The idea of a space telescope has been around for many decades, but only recently became a reality. The first proposal of a space telescope can be traced back to nineteen twenty three. Hermann Oberth known as the inventor of modern rocketry technology proposed that a telescope could be sent into space using a rocket. In the nineteen seventies the vision for a space telescope would become a reality.