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The next
contribution, by Alena Šolcová, deals with the incorrect name
''Tycho de Brahe'', and who might have been responsible for this version
of the Danish astronomer's name. She traces the name back to a novel of the
effluent German writer Amalia Schoppe, Tycho de Brahe. Ein historischer
Roman of 1839, and to the Bohemian journalist Anton Fähnrich, who
wrote an article on der große Sternenforscher Tycho de Brahe in
1841. The author gives a brief biography of Fähnrich, but not one of the
quite colorful Mrs. Schoppe (Burg auf Fehmarn 1791 - New York 1858). But are
these the earliest occurrences? Using the Karlsruher virtueller Katalog (http://www.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/kvk.html),
it was easy for the reviewer to find an earlier, and much more authoritative
source, the Göttingen mathematician and historian of science Abraham
Gotthelf Kästner, who used "de Brahe'' in an article of 1783 and later in
his verbose, and thus quite voluminous Geschichte der Mathematik. And
this may not be the earliest occurrence of "de Brahe'' in the printed record.
Tycho is also called "von Brahe'' in the first German biography, translated by
Philander von der Weistritz (= Chr. Gottlob Mengel).
An interesting article
by Zdislav Šíma and Jirí Valeška deals with the
identification of true handwritten notes by Tycho Brahe. The next article, by
Josef Smolka, deals with G.J. Rheticus und Prag, and I like to praise
the author for not expressing himself in the standard scientific language of
poor English, but, instead, in German. However, I deplore that none of the
editors (assuming that there are German-speaking persons among them) has taken
the effort to eliminate the numerous typographic and stylistic inaccuracies
that distract from the reading of this interesting article. And not only that -
the book is full of misprints, errors and inaccuracies; in the year of Mozart's
250th birthday, let us paraphrase the words which were first sung in Prague:
"Ma in questo libro son già mille e tre''!
Armin Gerl investigates the relations
between Galilei and Kepler, and tries to find out the reasons why the former
did not recognize the latter's insight, and only quoted him in order to
criticize him. Besides Kepler's dark and mathematically demanding texts it
especially was Kepler's mystic world view and his speculations about forces
acting at a distance which Galilei abhorred. The "pansophy'' cultivated at
Rudolf II's Prague court, the longing for universal knowledge and the unveiling
of God's master plan culminated in Kepler's Harmonice Mundi; Galilei, however,
was afraid that such mystical speculations discredited Copernicus'
teachings.
Thomas Posch and Franz Kerschbaum deal
with a "hot topic'' of 2004: the Venus transits of 1631 and 1639, their
prediction by Kepler and Horrocks, the planetary theories on which these
predictions were based, Horrocks' observation and reduction of the event, and
the posthumous publication of his results by Hevelius.
Klaudia
Einhorn and Günter Wuchterl analyze Kepler's Wallenstein-horoscopes that
bring some light into Kepler's relation to astrology. Rahlf Hansen deals with
another aspect of Kepler's astrology, i.e. the explanation of the star of
Bethlehem, which was presumably caused by a rare planetary constellation - the
brightening of Kepler's supernova of 1604 indeed was preceded by another such
rare constellation. Hansen argues that there is no need to postulate a historic
event, but that there were strong political-theological reasons to include such
an event in the Christmas texts. Let us quote another confusing misprint here:
"Münter (1821) Quoten in Zdeler(1826)''. After a vain attempt to find the
Zedler Lexicon in the list of references, an Ideler is finally found: thus the
section should read: Münter (1821) quoted in Ideler
(1826)!
Franz Daxecker gives a summary of
Christoph Scheiner's principal work "Rosa Ursina'', which also form part of his
Scheiner biography, p. 124-144 (see JAD 11-3).
René Zandbergen and Rafal T. Prinke give a summary of the
astronomical contents of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, presumably written
by Roger Bacon (13th century) and presumably bought by Emperor Rudolf II for
his art chamber, but these things, as well as the general purpose and the
meaning of the (undecipherable) text remain obscure. Maybe the whole thing is
just a hoax of a 15th century predecessor of Konrad Kujau (In the 1970s, K.
Kujau wrote 63 "diaries of Adolf Hitler'' and sold them to the magazine Stern
for more than 3 million German marks.) \noindent
Georg Schuppener gives a very instructive review article on
theastronomical activities cultivated by the jesuits at the Prague Clementinum
(founded in 1556, abolished in 1773). Pavel Chadima and Martin Šolc, in a
well-illustrated contribution, describe the astronomical instruments which were
on display in the Musaeum Mathematicum of the Clementinum, which existed from
1722 to1785. Today, the items are kept in various collections, and they were
reunited, in 1998 in the framework of an exhibit celebrating the 650th
anniversary of Charles University.
Peter Brosche
reminds us of the life and work of Alois David, who was the director of Prague
Observatory between 1800 and 1836. In his younger years, David corresponded
with Franz Xaver von Zach, and the latter one encouraged him to carry out
astronomical position-finding in Bohemia.
Ivan
Štoll and Gudrun Wolfschmidt deal with Christan Doppler and the effect
that carries his name. While Štoll's article focuses on Doppler's life,
Wolfschmidt broadly deals with the astrophysical applications. To mention again
a funny misprint: the title of Doppler's famous paper is quoted as "Ueber das
farbige Licht der Dopplersterne...'' (p. 196) - a few pages later, the
titlepage is shown in facsimile, where the proper title is
given.
Gudrun Wolfschmidt's second report deals
with Joseph Petzval, who was born in Hungary (today his birthplace is situated
in Slovakia). His life and work is briefly described on two pages, the
remainder of the long article deals with astronomical photography. The reviewer
stumbled over the technical details of William Usherwood's "portrait lens of
short focal length of 2.4 m'' (p. 216), which would have been bulky and heavy.
Indeed the reference quoted in the article does not lead to any technical
details, but the reviewer found an article by Pasachoff et al. (J. Hist. Astr.
27, 129, 1996) that displays not only interesting photographic documents, but
also quotes from a letter of Usherwood: "my camera is for plates nine inch
square Lens three & a quarter inch. A Portrait lens twelve inch focal
length...'' (i.e. 1:3.7, f = 305mm).
Izold
Pustylnik describes the history of the Petzval astrograph of Tartu Observatory,
which was put into operation in 1911 and was used in the 1920s and 30s by
Öpik and collaborators for different types of research. Does it still
exist? The author only says "it has been used for many years''. In the next
article, Martin Šolc describes the fate of a Prague astrograph, which was
acquired from Max Wolf in 1892. Again, the history is given only vaguely - in
any case, the telescope was reconstructed recently from fragments found
inruins.
The concluding paper by Martin Šolc
and Alena Míšková deals with Czech and German Astronomers at
the Prague University. This ½ page contribution is labelled as an
"abstract'', and it is noted that "a more extensive meeting'' would be
necessary "to cover all the different facets of this time in an unbiased way.''
Let us mention that more than 40 years after the Elysée Treaty, a -
hopefully unbiased - "Multinational History of Strasbourg Observatory'' has
appeared in 2005, edited by André Heck. I wonder how long it will take
to carry out the same task for Prague Observatory.
To conclude: a collection of interesting papers, sometimes not very
thoroughly researched, and in addition very sloppily edited - or is editing
nowadays nothing more as the uncontrolled (?) processing of LaTeX files?
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