The Journal of Astronomical Data 2002, Volume 8 ABSTRACTS =============================================================== [JAD 8, 1] Short period spectral variability in the Be stars I: eta Centauri andepsilon Capricorni L.A. Balona We present high-dispersion echelle spectra of two Be stars, eta Cen (819 spectra) and epsilon Cap (121 spectra), which were intensively monitored for line profile variations. Analysis of these data show that the periodic line profile variations are strongly visible in the circumstellar medium, suggesting that they are probably due to co-rotating circumstellar clouds. The complexity of the line profiles and the nature of the period analysis may account for apparent multiperiodicity which is sometimes reported in the radial velocities. [JAD 8, 2] The atmospheric extinction at San Pedro Martir, Mexico: Individual observations, monthly and yearly averages W.J. Schuster, L. Parrao and J. Guichard The individual nightly determinations of the atmospheric extinction above San Pedro Martir (SPM) are presented from 82 nights of 13-color observations over the years 1980-1983 and from 287 nights of uvby observations over the years 1984-1999. Monthly and yearly averages are also given and compared for the years 1973-1999. [JAD 8, 3] CCD time-series photometry of BQ Ind C. Sterken, E. Brogt, J.N. Fu and A.Y. Zhou We present CCD time-series photometry of BQ Ind, which is either a Population I large-amplitude delta Scuti star or an SX Phoenicis star. [JAD 8, 4] BOOK REVIEW: Geheimnisvolles Universum - Europas Astronomen entschleiern das Weltall Dirk H. Lorenzen Published by Franck-Kosmos GmbH \& Co., Stuttgart. 2002 ISBN 3-440-09246-1, Price: 49.90 EUR (D) (208 p, 155 color and 33 b&w photos) The 25th birthday of ESO, in 1987, was celebrated by the publication of an illustrated popular book, "Exploring the Southern Sky" (Springer-Verlag 1987), which also saw editions in Danish, English, French, German, and Spanish. Written and illustrated by the ESO staff members Svend Laustsen, Claus Madsen and Richard M. West, its many pictures were mainly taken with the ESO 3.6m and Schmidt telescopes. The structure of the book - perhaps at that time somewhat unusual - started with things far away (Universe and galaxies), zoomed in to the Milky Way, and finally reached the Solar System (with a concluding chapter dealing with the La Silla observatory). Now, with the 4 units of the Very Large Telescope in full operation, and on the occasion of ESO's 40th birthday, another jubilee book has appeared: "Geheimnisvolles Universum: Europas Astronomen entschleiern das Weltall", written by the science journalist Dirk H. Lorenzen, of Hamburg, Germany, and prefaced by Catherine Cesarsky, Director General of ESO. Presumably, this book will also soon become available in more languages spoken in ESO member countries. Thus it may be worthwhile to review the first edition, although some readers may like to wait for more easily accessible editions. Before going into details, let me first mention that I find this a very impressing book, great to look at and refreshing to read. With ESO seen through the eyes of a visitor, things gain a perspective that is quite different from that of the previous book, and at least as attractive. It comes as no surprise that the book starts with a visit of ESO's showcase, the Paranal Observatory, and the writer not only notes down his own impressions, but also cites statements of some of the many people that keep Paranal going - technicians and staff astronomers. This mixture of texts provides a good impression of the operations at a large observatory for the general reader. The two more 'astronomical' parts that follow deal with star and planet formation, stellar death and dust formation, as well as with the Universe, its beginnings and contents (focussing on quasars and SN Ia); like the previous chapters, they contain many quotations of astronomers involved in these types of research (I suppose they are taken from interviews); these blocks, each composed of three chapters, are separated by a more technical part, two chapters dealing with interferometry and adaptive optics. The last third of the book is then dedicated almost exclusively to ESO's "prehistory", and here the reviewer starts to frown. This is a very extensive report on Juergen Stock's early site testing work for US astronomers, first for Gerard Kuiper and the University of Texas, and then for the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), to find an suitable place for a projected telescope and then for the AURA southern observatory, with page-long excerpts from his notebooks (or the printed "Stock reports"). It also deals with Stock's later activities in Chile and Venezuela. Finally, there are a few pages on the foundation of ESO and the choice of a Chilean site, as well as another few pages on future projects of ESO. The decision of ESO to go to Chile is treated very briefly, much shorter than in Blaauw's 1991 book "ESO's Early History"; the reasons for the early focussing on a site in South Africa, and the relatively quick jump on the "Chilean bandwagon" remain quite obscure. Compared to that, the 25 pages of "Stock reports" written to help the decision making of the site of the AURA observatory, contain a lot of not-too-relevant details like prices and names of horses and mules employed in Stock's site testing survey. It is fun reading, but does not penetrate under the surface, and the author's somewhat desperate attempt to join together the ends of the threat, "also the VLT is a consequence of Juergen Stock's activities in Chile", appears not very convincing. I do not want at all to diminish Stock's immense work that made Chile to the "golden land of astronomy" in the late decades of the 20th century. Stock was sent by the US astronomers, and they became active because of Kuiper's enthusiasm, that was triggered by a visit of Federico Rutlland, director of the Astronomy Department of the Universidad de Chile - the former Chilean National Observatory, whose founding was triggered by the activities of a US astronomical expedition in the mid-19th century, headed by James Gilliss; and Gilliss was inspired by an astronomical proposition made in 1847 by Christian Gerling, a mathematics professor of Marburg. And besides this line of events, there have been other astronomical expeditions and observing stations in the north of Chile in the late 19th and early 20th century. What is the true first cause of the presently florishing astronomical activity in Chile? Certainly not the "Stock report"! At times ESO's development resembled more a random walk than a strategic process, that - given enough time and money - finally culminated in a very successful research institution. This very pretty and informative book, whose author - intentionally or unintentionally - had the courage to neglect important things, and to include irrelevant things, is not a book that tells the whole story (and actually no book can achieve this goal!). Even a book like Lorenzen's that is composed of huge fragments that do not quite fit into the story, can make fascinating reading. However, besides the publisher's logo, this book carries the ESO logo, and therefore becomes something like an "official" ESO publication. And this is why one wonders why so much space is used up to describe activities which have hardly any relation to ESO's history, a history that really deserves to be communicated to the interested general public. If this book would encourage some of the early players of ESO to pen down their memoirs and make them available to science writers and historians, a story at least as colorful as that of Juergen Stock would emerge! And only then it would be possible to write a more balanced history of ESO. Reviewed by H.W. Duerbeck [JAD 8, 5] BOOK REVIEW: Beitraege zur Astronomiegeschichte, Band 5 (Acta Historica Astronomiae Vol. 15) Wolfgang R. Dick & Juergen Hamel (eds.) Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Harri Deutsch GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2002. ISBN 3-8171-1686-1, ISSN 1422-8521. 261 pages. Price 16.80 EUR(D) The 15th volume of the Acta Historica Astronomiae is at the same time the fifth collection of essays on the history of astronomy (Beitraege zur Astronomiegeschichte, Band 5), edited by the historians of astronomy W.R. Dick (Potsdam) and J. Hamel (Berlin). Besides a few short notices and book reviews, the book contains 11 major articles, which deal with astronomical topics covering the time from the 16th to the 20th centuries. The first article, on the analysis and interpretation of historical horoscopes as a source of the history of science, is based on the inaugural lecture of its author, Guenther Oestmann. After a general introduction, which deals with the principles of horoscope making, the author discusses the horoscope of Count Heinrich Ranzau (1526-1598), the Danish governor of Schleswig-Holstein, who was a friend of Tycho Brahe. Oestmann shows that the astronomical-mathematical basis of such a horoscope can be reconstructed and interpreted. However, it is hardly possible to gain an insight in the process how the interpretation of a horoscope was done in detail. The second and third articles, by Franz Daxecker, deal with Athanasius Kircher and Christoph Scheiner, two catholic astronomers of the 17th century. Kircher's Organum Mathematicum is a calculating device that can be used in the fields of arithmetic, geometry, chronology, astronomy, astrology and others. The author provides extracts of the description of the Organum taken from a book by Caspar Schott, which deal with chronology and astronomy. A photograph of the Organum indicates that this tool consists of a set of tables glued on wooden or cardboard, but details of its contents and applications remain pretty obscure for the reader - a few elaborated examples would have been helpful. The second paper deals with the life of Christoph Scheiner SJ, the co-discoverer of sunspots (next to Galileo), after leaving Rome in 1633 - the year of the Galileo trial. Scheiner spent his later years in the Austrian and Bohemian (Jesuit) provinces, mainly in Vienna and Neisse (the present Nysa in Silesia, Poland), but no traces of further astronomical activity have survived, if they ever existed. The fourth article, by Hans Gaab, is a very thoroughly researched biography of Johann Philipp von Wurzelbau (1651-1725), an merchant turned astronomer from Nuremberg. Wurzelbau started his activities at Christoph Eimmart's (the director of the painters' academy in Nuremberg) private observatory, and his first published work deals with observations of the great comet of 1680. Furthermore, he observed solar eclipses, Mercury transits, and determined the geographical latitude of Nuremberg. The article also contains a detailed description of Wurzelbau's observatory and its instruments. The fifth paper, by Klaus-Dieter Herbst, deals with Gottfried Kirch's idea of founding an astronomical society - being a vehicle to publishing astronomical observations. Kirch (1639-1710) was a well-known astronomer and calendar manufacturer. Around 1700, Kirch was appointed first astronomer at the Brandenburg society of sciences, and director of the observatory that was to be established with the new Berlin Academy. Herbst shows that Kirch's religious attitude that converged on pietism was a driving force to establish a scientific society. However, the final failure of such a project is due to the emergence of the scientific journal Acta Eruditorum, issued since 1682 in Leipzig, which could serve as an outlet for the publication of astronomical data by Kirch and others, thus fulfilling an essential task of the projected academy. Kirch's occupation with the composition of calendars, which took most of his time, was another reason. The following three shorter articles deal with 19th century astronomy. Peter Brosche describes an early visual photometer employed by Johann Gottfried Koehler (1745-1801) in Dresden, Alberto Meschiari edits and comments letters by Franz Xaver von Zach (1754-1832) to the physicist Gerbi in Pisa and the librarian Pozzetti at Bologna, and Karin Reich describes and edits Bessel's book critique of Gauss' Theoria Motus. How many one-time astronomers have to earn their living in other ways, become distracted from astronomical research, and vanish from the horizon of astronomical history? In the ninth paper, Hans-Joachim Ilgauds has traced the life of Georg Koch (1851-1905), who started his career as an astronomer at Leipzig Observatory in 1874. Later Koch worked at Hamburg Observatory, and then became an employee at the statistical office in Kiel, and finally director of the statistical office of the Hamburg revenue service. He was a collaborator for the statistical yearbook of German cities, and also contributed to a book investigating the causes and the impact of the cholera epidemic of 1892 in Hamburg. The last two papers deal with the circumstances of the discovery of the first Near-Earth asteroid (433) Eros. It was recorded on photographic plates taken at the Urania-Sternwarte Berlin and at Nice Observatory. The Berlin observer Witt announced the discovery, and only later, the Nice observer Charlois published a position of Eros. While all plates have disappeared, the authors Hans Scholl and Lutz D. Schmadel could prove that the Nice plate was poorly guided and Charlois would have been unable to discover the object. From a copy of the Berlin plate, published 50 years after the discovery by Witt's co-observer F. Linke, the exact position was determined, and the time of observation (which had not been published) was derived. The second article, by Lutz D. Schmadel, deals with the life of the Eros co-discoverer Felix Linke (1879-1959), who later worked in statistic offices, was a frequent writer of popular scientific articles, and later the editor of a journal, "Technik im Hotel'', and author of a book of the same title. As can be seen from the summaries given above, this collection of essays deals mainly with historical events that occurred in Germany and neighboring countries, and is focussed mainly on events in the 17th to 19th centuries. Except for the Eros article by Scholl and Schmadel, which is written in English, all contributions are written in German. The editors have taken care that generally a high standard was kept. The series appears to be a complement to the Journal for the History of Astronomy, in spite of the fact that its scope is somewhat narrower and somewhat less international. Of course, the use of the German language and the Germany-based small publishing company hampers a wide distribution of this series (but an all-English edition would turn away potential German readers). Nevertheless, it should be noted that English is not necessarily the "lingua franca'' in all cultural fields, and students of the history of science should have at least a cursory knowledge of several languages at their command. It would be nice to see that such a history of astronomy series would also be published in other countries, focussing on the historical events in these regions (French, Italian, Spanish - it should be mentioned that a series Istoriko-astronomicheskie issledovaniia has appeared since 1955 in Moscow). In any case, the editors should be congratulated in having established (with a lot of personal engagement) a flourishing book series. I hope that their venture may serve as an example for others. Reviewed by H.W. Duerbeck [JAD 8, 6] BOOK REVIEW: Astronomie von Olbers bis Schwarzschild. Nationale Entwicklungen und internationale Beziehungen im 19. Jahrhundert (Acta Historica Astronomiae Vol. 16) Wolfgang R. Dick & Juergen Hamel (eds.) Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Harri Deutsch GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2002. ISBN 3-8171-1667-5, ISSN 1422-8521. 243 pages. The 14th volume of the Acta Historica Astronomiae is the Proceedings of a Colloquium International Relationships in Astronomy (in German) organised by the History of Astronomy Section of the Astronomische Gesellschaft held on September 18 in Lilienthal, Germany. The book contains 13 articles on astronomical topics covering the 19th and 20th centuries. The first paper is by Guenther Oestmann and deals with contemporary assessments of Johann Hieronymus Schroeter's (1745-1816) astronomical works and with later judgements of the scientific importance and significance of his observations as seen by astronomers and historians. This report is complemented by a second article on Schroeter's 25-ft reflector in Lilienthal near Bremen. To this end, author Felix Luehning has constructed a scale model of the telescope, and shows how the building of a model brings a deeper understanding of function and handling of this instrument. This brings us to a third paper on telescope building in Lilienthal: Hans-Joachim Leue describes the cooperation of Johann Hieronymus Schroeter and Johann Gottlieb Schrader in developing a white reflecting metal alloy for use as telescope mirror. The fourth article, by Klaus Schillinger, describes on the basis of archival documents the aquisition history of the Herschel telescopes, including telescope quality check, repair and building. Memorial sites referring to Wilhelm Olbers, Johann Hieronymus Schroeter, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel and Carl Friedrich Gauss are described by Arno Langkavel in two walks outlined in the very last paper of this book. Peter Brosche, in the fifth paper, discusses the rediscovery of Ceres in December1801, a discovery that was the result of the combined efforts of a theoretician (Gauss) and an observer (Zach). Juergen Hamel's paper is based on previously unused archival sources and discusses the outstanding role played by H. C. Schumacher (1780-1850, editor of the Astronomische Nachrichten) in the communication between astronomers in his days, when his working place at Altona still belonged to the kingdom of Denmark. This paper is followed by a second one by the same author and deals with the correspondence of H. C. Schumacher and H C. Oersted (1777-1851) and shows how intense and diverse their cooperation was. In a subsequent paper, Wolfgang Kokott describes the role of the Astronomisches Jahrbuch (published from 1776 by the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin), a ranking international publication, with Bode's modest Berlin Observatory serving as a clearinghouse of information originating from virtually all European countries. ``Karl Schwarzschild and the professionalisation of Astrophysics'' is the title of Theodor Schmidt-Kaler's contribution and presents Schwarzschild's contributions to professionalization of astronomy: establishment of course lectures and a permanent astrophysical laboratory, a tight connection between teaching and research, stimulations and suggestions for astronomy at high school and for the formation of high school teachers, international organisation, and the planning of a southern observatory. Peter Habison describes the contribution of Leo de Ball (1853-1916, Director of the Kuffner Observatory in Vienna) to international astronomy. Internationalization in astronomy is also discussed in a following paper by Gudrun Wolfschmidt on the establishment of the Vereinigte Astronomische Gesellschaft, the international Astronomische Gesellschaft in 1863 and finally the International Astronomical Union in 1919. In the second but last paper of the book, Hilmar Duerbeck describes the history of the Chilean National Observatory, beginning with its origins out of Gilliss' US Naval Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere in 1849, over its directors Moesta, Vergara, Obrecht and Ristenpart, to the middle of the 20th century. The paper also includes the astronomical development at the Universidad Catolica and various international expeditions, which aimed at the observations of solar eclipses, the Venus transit of 1882, and the Mars opposition of 1907. An overview of the evolution and the actual state of the international observatories Cerro Tololo, La Silla and Paranal, as well as Las Campanas is also given. Reviewed by C. Sterken [JAD 8, 7] BOOK REVIEW: Jean-Charles Houzeau et son temps Pierre Verhas. Published by Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Arthur Mergelynck Foundation, 2002. ISBN 2-8031-0187-4, 240 pages. **** Reviewed by C. Sterken