The Journal of Astronomical Data 2013, Volume 19 ABSTRACTS =============================================================== [JAD 19, 1] MEETING VENUS. A Collection of Papers presented at the Venus Transit Conference Tromsoe 2012 C. Sterken and P. P. Aspaas (Eds.) On 2-3 June 2012, the University of Tromsoe hosted a conference about the cultural and scientific history of the transits of Venus. The conference took place in Tromsoe for two very specific reasons. First and foremost, the last transit of Venus of this century lent itself to be observed on the disc of the Midnight Sun in this part of Europe during the night of 5 to 6 June 2012. Second, several Venus transit expeditions in this region were central in the global enterprise of measuring the scale of the solar system in the eighteenth century. The site of the conference was the Nordnorsk Vitensenter (Science Centre of Northern Norway), which is located at the campus of the University of Tromsoe. After the conference, participants were invited to either stay in Tromsoe until the midnight of 5-6 June, or take part in a Venus transit voyage in Finnmark, during which the historical sites Vardoe, Hammerfest, and the North Cape were to be visited. The post-conference program culminated with the participants observing the transit of Venus in or near Tromsoe, Vardoe and even from a plane near Alta. These Proceedings contain a selection of the lectures delivered on 2-3 June 2012, and also a narrative description of the transit viewing from Tromsoe, Vardoe and Alta. The title of the book, Meeting Venus, refers the title of a play by the Hungarian film director, screenwriter and opera director Istvan Szabo (1938-). The autobiographical movie Meeting Venus (1991) directed by him is based on his experience directing Tannhauser at the Paris Opera in 1984. The movie brings the story of an imaginary international opera company that encounters a never ending series of difficulties and pitfalls that symbolise the challenges of any multicultural and international endeavour. As is evident from the many papers presented in this book, Meeting Venus not only contains the epic tales of the transits of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it also covers the conference participants' encounter with "Venus on the Sun" in historical archives as well as face-to-face at several locations in the Troms and Finnmark counties. [JAD 19, 1A] A Synoptic Overview of Selected Key People and Key Places Involved in Historical Transits of Venus Christiaan Sterken and Per Pippin Aspaas This paper presents an overview of the dramatis personae et situs, or significant characters and places dealt with in this book. Several geographical and political maps, and timelines are provided as an aid to the reader. [JAD 19, 1B] Science in Transit: Enlightenment Research Policy and Astronomy in Sweden Sven Widmalm Swedish participation in the international efforts to measure the transits of Venus in the 1760s was impressive considering the size and the relative youth of the mathematical and astronomical community in the country. In this paper it is argued that the relative success of the Swedish contribution may be seen as the result of an early-modern form of research policy. This policy was promoted by the progressive so-called Hat Party that came into power in the late 1730s, an event that coincided with the creation of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, soon to emerge as an organizational hub of astronomical research in Sweden and to some extent also on the European level. The close connection between the scientific and political elites in Enlightenment Sweden made possible the creation and international integration of a Swedish research community, not least in astronomy under the leadership of the Academy's perpetual secretary and astronomer Pehr Wargentin. The fact that these elites shared a common fate is also illustrated by their simultaneous decline from around 1770. [JAD 19, 1C] Transit Observations as Means to Re-establish the Reputation of the Russian Academy of Sciences Gudrun Bucher This paper explores how Catherine II used the worldwide attention given to observations of the transit of Venus to bring back the Russian Academy of Sciences into international recognition. Starting from the planned observations of the transit of Venus at various locations of the Russian Empire, the expeditions became more complex because naturalists were added to the astronomical expeditions. As the naturalists got separate instructions, their expeditions became more and more independent of the astronomers and eventually became known as the famous Academic Expeditions with a tremendous output of publications. This was the second huge effort made by Russia during the eighteenth century to explore scientifically remote parts of its empire. As far as individual Venus transit expeditions are concerned, this paper focuses on those that visited places in the southern parts of the Ural Mountains and the northern shores of the Caspian Sea. [JAD 19, 1D] Denmark-Norway, 1761-1769: Two Missed Opportunities? Per Pippin Aspaas Despite a promising start in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Denmark-Norway was not a Great Power of Astronomy any longer when the eighteenth-century transits of Venus occurred. Official activity relating to the transit of 1761 was very limited; in this respect, Denmark-Norway was completely overshadowed by Sweden and Russia. In 1769 steps were taken to invite an astronomer of international reputation, the Jesuit Father Maximilianus Hell. He arrived in 1768 and left the country two years later, having published an elaborate report in the name of the King Christian VII. Although Hell's observations from Vardoehus were successful, Denmark-Norway failed to re-establish itself as a country capable of delivering noteworthy contributions to the European community of astronomers. Sweden and Russia displayed a higher level of activity, both quantitatively and qualitatively, making the impression of Denmark-Norway's lagging behind even stronger. [JAD 19, 1E] The Amateur Astronomer Anders Hellant and the Plight of his Observations of the Transits of Venus in Tornio, 1761 and 1769 Osmo Pekonen Anders Hellant was a versatile Swedish amateur scientist whose figure dominated eighteenth century intellectual life in Tornio, his little home town of some 500 inhabitants at the mouth of the Tornio river. My study is mainly based on the biographies published in Finnish (Bostroem 1918) and in Swedish (Tobe 1991) but I have also consulted some original sources in Paris and in Stockholm. Hellant incarnated almost all by himself the inquiring scientific spirit of the Age of Enlightenment in Swedish Lapland. There is much to be said about his life and works, but here I focus on his observations of the Venus passages in 1761 and 1769. [JAD 19, 1F] The Expeditions of William Bayly and Jeremiah Dixon to Honningsvag and Hammerfest, 1769 Nils Voje Johansen In 1769 the Royal Society in London sent the astronomers William Bayly and Jeremiah Dixon to northernmost Norway to observe the transit of Venus taking place the night between 3 and 4 June. The astronomers should set up two prefabricated observatories and were brought to Norway by H.M.S. Emerald, a ship provided by the Admiralty and commanded by Captain Charles Douglas. This paper describes the expedition as well as some results including Captain Douglas' attempt to measure the temperature of sea water at great depth. [JAD 19, 1G] Anders Johan Lexell's Role in the Determination of the Solar Parallax Johan Carl-Erik Sten and Per Pippin Aspaas Anders Johan Lexell (1740-1784) was a mathematician who gained considerable recognition for his scientific achievements during the century of Enlightenment. Born and educated in Abo/Turku in the Finnish part of the Swedish Realm, he was invited as an assistant and collaborator of Leonhard Euler at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg in 1768. After Euler's death in 1783 he inherited his mentor's chair and became professor of mathematics at the Petersburg Academy of Sciences, but survived only a year in this office. One of Lexell's first tasks in Saint Petersburg was to assist in the calculations involved in the Venus transit project of 1769. Under Euler's supervision, Lexell formulated a system of modeling equations involving the whole bulk of observation data obtained from all over the world. Thus, by searching (manually) the best estimate of the parallax with respect to all available measurements made of the Venus transit simultaneously, he anticipated later statistical modeling methods. The usual method at the time consisted of juxtaposing a pair of measurements at a time and taking a mean value of all the parallax values obtained in this way. What had started as an innocent, purely academic attempt to establish the solar parallax, soon escalated into a heated controversy of international dimensions. The roles played by Jerome de Lalande in Paris and Maximilian Hell in Vienna in this controversy are well known; Lexell's role less so. Our analysis has two aims. First, we elucidate Lexell's place in the international solar parallax controversy by making use of his published works as well as surviving parts of his correspondence. Second, we present the method used by Lexell and analyze his way of calculating the solar parallax. [JAD 19, 1H] Politicians, Patriots and Plotters: Unlikely Debates Occasioned by Maximilian Hell's Venus Transit Expedition of 1769 Laszlo Kontler This paper discusses the cultural and political contexts and reception of the most important by-product of Maximilian Hell's famous Venus transit expedition of 1768-69, the Demonstratio. Idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem esse (1770) by Hell's associate Janos Sajnovics. Now considered a landmark in Finno-Ugrian linguistics, the Demonstratio addressed an academic subject that was at that time almost destined to be caught up in an ideological battlefield defined by the shifting relationship between the Habsburg government, the Society of Jesus, and the Hungarian nobility. The "enlightened absolutist" policies of the former aimed at consolidating the Habsburg monarchy as an empire, at the expense of privileged groups, including religious orders as well as the noble estates. In the situation created by the 1773 suppression of the Jesuit order (a signal of declining patronage from the dynasty), the growing preoccupation on the part of ex-Jesuits like Hell and Sajnovics with "things Hungarian" could have been part of an attempt to re-situate themselves on the Central European map of learning. At the same time, the founding document of this interest, the Demonstratio, evoked violent protests from the other target of Habsburg policies, the Hungarian nobility, because its basic assumptions - the kinship of the Hungarian and the Sami (Lappian) language - potentially undermined the noble ideology of social exclusiveness, established on the alleged "Scythian" ancestry of Hungarians. By exploring the complex motives, intentions, reactions and responses of the chief agents in this story, it is possible to highlight the extra-scientific constraints and facilitators for the practice of knowledge in late eighteenth century Central Europe. [JAD 19, 1J] From Keplerian Orbits to Precise Planetary Predictions: the Transits of the 1630s Steinar Thorvaldsen The first transits of Mercury and Venus ever observed were important for quite different reasons than were the transit of Venus observed in the eighteenth century. Good data of planetary orbits are necessary for the prediction of planetary transits. Under the assumption of the central position of the Sun, Johannes Kepler published the theory of elliptical orbital motion of the planets in 1609; this new astronomy made it possible to compute noticeably improved ephemerides for the planets. In 1627 Kepler published the Tabulae Rudolphinae, and thanks to these tables he was able to publish a pamphlet announcing the rare phenomenon of Mercury and Venus transiting the Sun. Although the 1631 transit of Mercury was only observed by three astronomers in France and in Switzerland, and the 1639 transit of Venus was only predicted and observed by two self-taught astronomers in the English countryside, their observation would hardly been possible without the revolutionary theories and calculations of Kepler. The Tabulae Rudolphinae count among Kepler's outstanding astronomical works, and during the seventeenth century they gradually found entrance into the astronomical praxis of calculation among mathematical astronomers and calendar makers who rated them more and more as the most trustworthy astronomical foundation. [JAD 19, 1K] The French Savants, and the Earth-Sun Distance: a Resume Suzanne Debarbat Transits of Venus have played an important role during more than two centuries in determining the Earth-Sun distance. In 2012, three centuries after Cassini's death, the issue has been finally settled by the latest Resolution formulated by the International Astronomical Union. [JAD 19, 1M] Austrian-Hungarian Astronomical Observatories Run by the Society of Jesus at the Time of the 18th Century Venus Transits Thomas Posch, Per Pippin Aspaas, Akos Bazso and Isolde Mueller The Venus transit in June 1761 was the first one to be observed on a truly international scale: almost 250 astronomers followed this rare celestial event (e.g. Wulff 2012, p. 115), and at least 130 published successful observations of it (Aspaas 2012, p. 423). The present paper deals with the astronomical observatories built by the Society of Jesus in its eighteenth century "Provincia Austriae", at which the 1761 transit could be observed. Five Jesuit observatories are being presented in this context: three in today's Austria, namely, two in Vienna and one in Graz; one in Trnava in today's Slovakia and one in Cluj in today's Romania. Thereafter, we briefly examine which of these observatories submitted any Venus transit observations for publication in the appendix to Maximilian Hell's "Ephemerides astronomicae ad meridianum Vindobonensem" for the year 1762. [JAD 19, 1N] The Important Role of the Two French Astronomers J.-N. Delisle and J.-J. Lalande in the Choice of Observing Places during the Transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 Simone Dumont and Monique Gros Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, as a member of the Academie Royale des Sciences of Paris and professor at the College Royal de France, went to England in 1724 to visit Newton and Halley. The latter suggested observations of the transits of Mercury and of Venus in order to obtain the solar parallax. Delisle was also interested in the Mercury transits. After a stay of 22 years in Saint Petersburg, on his return to Paris, he distributed avertissements (information bulletins) encouraging all astronomers to observe the same phenomena, like the solar eclipse of 1748. Later, in 1760, Delisle presented an Adresse to the King and to the Academie in which he detailed his method to observe the 1761 transit of Venus. This was accompanied by a mappemonde showing the best places for observations. Copies of the text, together with 200 maps, were sent to his numerous correspondents in France and abroad. Following the advanced age and finally death of Delisle, his assistant and successor Joseph-Jerome Lalande presented a memoire related to the 1769 transit of Venus and an improved map of the best observing places. We detail the role of Delisle and Lalande in the preparation of the international collaboration related to these two transits. [JAD 19, 1P] Venusians: the Planet Venus in the 18th-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate David Duner In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it became possible to believe in the existence of life on other planets on scientific grounds. Once the Earth was no longer the center of the universe according to Copernicus, once Galileo had aimed his telescope at the Moon and found it a rough globe with mountains and seas, the assumption of life on other planets became much less far-fetched. In general there were no actual differences between Earth and Venus, since both planets orbited the Sun, were of similar size, and possessed mountains and an atmosphere. If there is life on Earth, one may ponder why it could not also exist on Venus. In the extraterrestrial life debate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Moon, our closest celestial body, was the prime candidate for life on other worlds, although a number of scientists and scholars also speculated about life on Venus and on other planets, both within our solar system and beyond its frontiers. This chapter discusses the arguments for life on Venus and those scientific findings that were used to support them, which were based in particular on assumptions and claims that both mountains and an atmosphere had been found on Venus. The transits of Venus in the 1760s became especially important for the notion that life could thrive on Venus. Here, I detect two significant cognitive processes that were at work in the search for life on Venus, i.e., analogical reasoning and epistemic perception, while analogies and interpretations of sensory impressions based on prior knowledge played an important role in astrobiological theories. [JAD 19, 1Q] Jean-Charles Houzeau and the 1882 Belgian Transit of Venus Expeditions Christiaan Sterken In 1871, the Belgian astronomer Jean-Charles Houzeau developed a new approach to determine the solar parallax. His "heliometer with unequal focal lengths" produces a large and a small solar image, as well as a large and a small image of Venus. Making the small solar and the large Venus image coincide yields a measure of the angular distance of the centers of both objects. Two such instruments were built for two Belgian expeditions to observe the Venus transit of December 6, 1882: one to San Antonio, Texas, and another one to Santiago de Chile. These were the first major expeditions in the history of Belgian science. This paper documents the expeditions, and clarifies the principal instrument and its present-day whereabouts. [JAD 19, 1R] Observation of Venus and Mercury Transits from the Pic-du-Midi Observatory Guy Ratier and Sylvain Rondi The Pic-du-Midi, on the French side of the Pyrenees, became a state observatory in the summer of 1882. The first major astronomical event to be observed was the Venus transit of 6 December 1882. Unfortunately this attempt by the well-known Henry brothers was unsuccessful due to bad weather conditions. During the twentieth century, the Pic-du-Midi became famous for the quality of its solar and planetary observations. In the sixties, Jean Rosch decided to use this experience to monitor the transits of Mercury. The objective was not to measure the parallax, but to determine the diameter of the planet in order to confirm its high density. Observations were made using a photometric method - the Hertzsprung method - during the transits of 1960, 1970 and 1973. The pioneer work of Ch. Boyer on the rotation of the Venus atmosphere as well as some experiments involving Lyot coronographs are also noteworthy. A Venus transit was finally observed on 8 June 2004 with a new CCD camera, providing a significant contribution to the model of the Venus mesosphere. This opened the field for new observations in 2012. [JAD 19, 1S] The Transit of Venus on the Midnight Sun Observed from the Tromsoe Region Steinar Thorvaldsen Tromsoe, the largest city in Northern Norway, is almost 70 degrees north, and, as luck would have it, a fantastic Midnight Sun shone down from the clear blue arctic sky during the entire night of the June 2012 transit. It was like a dream come true for astronomers in the area! The weather was perfect in most parts of the Tromsoe region, and the Norwegian national TV channel, NRK, got the front row for its marathon broadcast that lasted for more than seven hours. Several groups observed the night-long transit that started just after midnight and ended after 7 a.m. One group took the cable car just outside Tromsoe city to 420 m above sea level on Floeya mountain, while another group observed from the top of the Auroral Observatory by the lake Prestvannet on Tromsoe Island. Both groups had telescopes and cameras to stream video and pictures to the internet and to national TV broadcasts. [JAD 19, 1T] A Venus Transit Midnight Flight over Alta Guy Ratier and Sylvain Rondi After the Tromsoe conference, the author had planned to observe the 2012 Venus transit from a small plane flying over North Cape. This paper provides a summary report from this unusual expedition. [JAD 19, 1U] A Voyage to Vardoe. A Scientific Account of an Unscientific Expedition Christiaan Sterken, Per Pippin Aspaas, David Duner, Laszlo Kontler, Reinhard Neul, Osmo Pekonen and Thomas Posch After the "Venus Transit Conference" that took place at the University of Tromsoe from June 2 to June 3, 2012, participants were given the opportunity to either stay in Tromsoe until the night of June 5-6, or to participate in a voyage to Finnmark, where the historical sites Vardoe, Hammerfest, and the North Cape were to be visited. This voyage culminated in the observation of the 2012 transit of Venus at Vardoe. This paper gives a detailed account of this voyage that lasted from June 3 to June 6, and emphasizes the historical, scientific, philosophical, educational and cultural involvement of the participants of the voyage and of the local population. The paper concludes with reflections on the prime condition for success of any of the Venus transit expeditions of the past: the weather must cooperate in the first place - not only during the quarter of a day of the transit, but also during the preceding weeks and months in order to allow the explorers to rightly determine their geographic positions and correctly set their clocks. The latter factor is no longer an issue nowadays, but the weather aspect remains today a limiting factor as much as it was 250 years ago. Despite the variable and partly clouded weather at Vardoe during the time of the transit, the participants of this expedition were able to observe Venus in front of the Sun - with interruptions due to quickly moving clouds - between 4.30 a.m. and the fourth contact at 06:53:20 a.m. A large number of impressive, partly `dramatic' photographs have been taken especially in this time interval. [JAD 19, 1V] Hilmar W. Duerbeck: Leaves of Memory Christiaan Sterken This paper pays tribute to the memory of Hilmar W. Duerbeck, who was scheduled as one of the conference keynote speakers, but unexpectedly passed away in January 2012. The eulogy is set in the context of Hilmar's profound interest in the history of the transit of Venus expeditions. [JAD 19, 2] Results from the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory Variable Star Search Program: Background, Procedure, and Results from RAO Field 1 Michael D. Williams & E. F. Milone We describe a variable star search program and present the fully reduced results of a search in a 19 square (4.4 × 4.4) degree field centered on J2000 RA = 22:03:24, DEC= +18:54:32. The search was carried out with the Baker-Nunn Patrol Camera located at the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. A total of 26,271 stars were detected in the field, over a range of about 11-15 (instrumental) magnitudes. Our image processing made use of the IRAF version of the DAOPHOT aperture photometry routine and we used the ANOVA method to search for periodic variations in the light curves. We formally detected periodic variability in 35 stars, that we tentatively classify according to light curve characteristics: 6 EA (Algol), 5 EB (beta Lyrae), 19 EW (W UMa), and 5 RR (RR Lyrae) stars. Eleven of the detected variable stars have been reported previously in the literature. The eclipsing binary light curves have been analyzed with a package of light curve modeling programs and 25 have yielded converged solutions. Ten of these are of systems that are detached, 3 semi-detached, 10 overcontact, and 2 are of systems that appear to be in marginal contact. We discuss these results as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the instrument and of the program. [JAD 19, 3] BOOK REVIEW: A Journey with Fred Hoyle (Second Edition) C. Wickramasinghe, C. Sterken I read A Journey with Fred Hoyle: The Search for Cosmic Life shortly after the first edition appeared in 2005. The second expanded edition of this remarkable autobiographical account brings the scientific story up to date. The added Epilogue offers reflections in 2012, and shows that some of Hoyle's and Wickramasinghe's heretical theories have become accepted science today: these scientists were among the forerunners of today's astrobiology. The book is the story - presented as a blend of personal anecdotes, travel stories, references to political and social events, and science writing -of the remarkable 40-year friendship and scientific collaboration between the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle and the Sri Lankan mathematician and astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe. The author illuminates the story of his collaboration with Hoyle with interesting aspects of his personal life, such as the description of his educational background in Sri Lanka, and the story of how he, as a PhD student, made his first contact with his supervisor in 1960. The book also offers insights into Hoyle's and Wickramasinghe's family lives. The narrative also contains plenty of interstellar astrophysics along with the stories. Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was famous for his contribution to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, renowned for his coining (on BBC radio) of the term Big Bang and for his later rejection of that theory (coupled to his advocacy of the steady state cosmology), and famed as writer of more than a dozen science-fiction stories. He was the founding director of the Cambridge Institute of Theoretical Astronomy (that later became the Institute of Astronomy). Hoyle was a scientific whistleblower, a radical troublemaker, an unorthodox scientific mind, but also a victim of the system. Hoyle-Wickramasinghe thought was a long-term assault on conventional thinking: especially their notable concept of panspermia (that ever-present life pervades our universe) and their opposition to the accepted views on the origin of life (the primordial soup theory). This led to their two "heresies": disease-causing viruses come from space, and microbial life is omnipresent in interstellar space. They also opposed Darwinian theory, and launched a frontal assault on conventional theories of biological evolution on Earth. Hoyle, though, always played the role of devil's advocate until he was convinced that there were overwhelming arguments to support one of his radical propositions. All of this was done before the era of mass communication and powerful computers. The book also is a testimony about how scientists really work and how they cope with deep cultural bias, argumentation based on articles of faith, misrepresentations, standard dogmas, prejudices, jealousies, political intrigues, irrelevant squabbles in the "cloisters of universities" and politicised academies of science. Most interesting is also that, already in the first edition, reference is made to the detrimental impact of the practice of counting research papers and citations, to the role of the media in reporting on big science, and to how the publishing business works. The story also reveals that, despite high productivity, the continuity of their team was repeatedly threatened. In this context, Chandra Wickramasinghe's statement "my work was a solace" can be seen as pep talk for the ears of any desperate young scientist. This book is well worth reading, not only by astronomy students (and their supervisors), but also by any student in the physical sciences. The book is beautifully typeset in LaTeX by Stallion Press, and printed on fine glossy paper. It is a pity that the graphics are rather poor reproductions of the original graphs. More disturbing, though, is the number of typographical errors that were present in the first edition, and were not corrected for the second edition. [JAD 19, 4] BOOK REVIEW: Galileo's Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts M. Peterson, C. Sterken Galileo's Muse is a book that focuses on the life and thought of Galileo Galilei. The Prologue consists of a first chapter on Galileo the humanist and deals with Galileo's influence on his student Vincenzo Viviani (who wrote a biography of Galileo). This introductory chapter is followed by a very nice chapter that describes the classical legacy: Pythagoreanism and Platonism, Euclid and Archimedes, and Plutarch and Ptolemy. The author explicates the distinction between Greek and Roman contributions to the classical legacy, an explanation that is crucial for understanding Galileo and Renaissance mathematics. The following eleven chapters of this book arranged in a kind of quadrivium, viz., Poetry, Painting, Music, Architecture present arguments to support the author's thesis that the driver for Galileo's genius was not Renaissance science as is generally accepted but Renaissance arts brought forth by poets, painters, musicians, and architects. These four sets of chapters describe the underlying mathematics in poetry, visual arts, music and architecture. Likewise, Peterson stresses the impact of the philosophical overtones present in geometry, but absent in algebra and its equations. Basically, the author writes about Galileo, while trying to ignore the Copernican controversy, which he sees as distracting attention from Galileo's scientific legacy. As such, his story deviates from the standard myth on Galileo. But the book also looks at other eminent characters, such as Galileo's father Vincenzo (who cultivated music and music theory), the painter Piero della Francesca (who featured elaborate perspectives in his work), Dante Alighieri (author of the Divina Commedia), Filippo Brunelleschi (who engineered the dome of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Johannes Kepler (a strong supporter of Galileo's Copernicanism), etc. This book is very well documented: it offers, for each chapter, a wide selection of excellent biographical notes, and includes a fine index. This work can serve as a reference handbook for anyone teaching the history of Renaissance sciences, and in particular, the history of Renaissance astronomy. The graphics (about two dozen geometrical figures, and one reproduction from a 16th-century book) are adequate, but the figures in the book are not numbered. What I find disturbing, though, is the author's habit to cite Renaissance (and more ancient) publications with their translated titles only.