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The first optical observations of stars: Galileo Galilei or Tycho Brahe?

Issue 3 from 01.09.2006

The early history of optical observations in astronomy still contains many little-known episodes concerning the first attempts to observe the heavens with the aid of glass lenses. The «Uranometria» of Johann Bayer (1572-1625), a celestial atlas compiled at the beginning of the seventeenth century, contains an accidental trace or symbolic astronomical record of the early attempts at using optical components in angle-measuring devices. This atlas was published in Augsburg in 1603 as an illustrative appendix to Tycho Brahe’s celestial catalog. Tycho, however, died suddenly in 1601 and never saw Bayer’s publication.

This essay tries to explain the meaning of some symbols representing several specially depicted stars in the maps of this celestial atlas. These objects appear as pairs when observed by telescope. The contradiction consists in that similar symbols were also used to depict some optical pairs observed by the naked eye. Comparison between these two types of paired stars allows one to surmise that research efforts using optical components in viewfinders occurred considerably earlier than the appearance of the most known telescopes, as part of the process of resolving the levant astronomical problems of the time.

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