Eleven comets were discovered by six New Zealanders from New Zealand shores. New Zealand's important geographical position south of the Equator is highlighted. This location allows observers to discover and observe comets that would be difficult to see from the Northern Hemisphere. The lives of these comet discoverers are explored, as well as the discovery circumstances and an analysis of the morphological changes of their comets. We find that numerous New Zealand observers made many observations of these comets, however, relatively few were included in international publications, this possibly being due to papers about them not being submitted to overseas journals. We also note an interesting trend in that the number of New Zealand newspaper articles relating to these comet discoveries plummeted after the 1946 discovery by Albert Jones. We speculate as to why this may have happened.
The discussion relevant for explaining any celestial event, was a crucial aspect of all Classical Indian astronomical texts. Each text contained a chapter titled Parilekhana, provided instructions for creating these diagrams. This paper presents examples from different manuscripts, to illustrate the techniques used. The diagrams vividly demonstrate the perceptual differences between the East-West directions. & Sacute;rngonnati, the section for depicting the orientation of the cusps of the Moon, also features pertinent diagrams.
Among the three comets that appeared in rapid succession between August 1618 and January 1619, comet C/1618 V1 stands out as a particularly intriguing object. Its appearance was overshadowed by the very bright comet C/1618 W1, which emerged soon after C/1618 V1's discovery. As a result, relatively few observations of C/1618 V1 were published, with a few of them even attributed to C/1618 W1, which was a much brighter comet. The confusion was further compounded by the concurrent use of both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Due to the scarce observational material, it took until 1985 for a rough orbit to be published. Here we critically assess the available observations and show that the comet was moving in a decidedly different orbit than indicated in 1985. Based mainly on observations by Jesuits carried out from India we show that the comet is a member of the Kreutz group of sungrazing comets.
In 1975 activity started to launch stratospheric balloons for scientific research from a base at Milo, near Trapani, in West Sicily. The first three flights were across the Atlantic Ocean and reached the United States, but this program was stopped by the USA Administration. The base at Milo was than devoted to flights across the Western Mediterranean Sea that terminated in Spain. This was a very interesting prospect for the Italian teams researching high-energy astrophysics to design and carry out new experiments for hard X-ray and gamma-ray observations. The Milo base was active up to 2003, and was officially closed in 2012. Here we report the main facts leading up to the establishment of this base, and we summarize the main high-energy astrophysics experiments launched by balloons in those years, and their heritage. This activity was fundamental for the growth of this research community, which later designed and built the first-and very successful-Italian X-ray satellite, BeppoSAX.
Armenia is home to several megalithic sites yet to be thoroughly researched. The area near the villages of Hartashen and Ashotsk in the Northern Shirak region is home to three such sites. While some investigations have been performed, they failed to provide an interpretation of the purpose of the megaliths. Although the sites have not yet undergone formal dating, the material remains and contextual evidence points to a plausible period that we adopt provisionally; within this framework, we seek to explore the possible meaning of their configuration. In this study we perform a skyscape analysis of the orientation and illumination effects of two megalithic sites consisting of several three-row linear avenues. The analysis consists of in situ measurements of their azimuths and horizon profiles to determine the celestial declination. In addition, 3D models of the terrain and megaliths are used to analyze the illumination effects throughout the year. An interesting discovery is represented by a megalith in Ashotsk 2 resembling Mt. Aragats visible to the East. Statistical analysis shows a high similarity between the two. Furthermore, results show that the orientation and position of the megaliths can be linked to the solstices and lunastices as well as with the circumpolar region of the sky. This behavior is similar to those of cultures in the region (e.g., Hittite Kingdom, Egyptian Kingdom, Mesopotamia) especially in relation to funerary practices. The statistical analysis indicates a low probability that these alignments are accidental.
This paper describes the main collection of optical instruments gathered, used, and maintained by the succession of custodian Radcliffe Observers from 1773 until 1935. In the late 1770s the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford, held a collection of instruments that was described as the best Europe. Investment in instruments was substantial, but far less than expenditure on the architectural buildings that housed them, as fine architecture was deemed essential to memorialise John Radcliffe and bring honour to the Radcliffe Trustees. However, over the following 150 years, the collection of instruments at the Observatory suffered during periods of funding difficulties but also benefited from periods of considerable new investment. This paper examines the ways in which limitations in funding led to changes in the ways that instruments were housed. It also shows the dynamic nature of the collection and the architecture of the Observatory in response to changes in funding, knowledge, and engineering.
This paper represents our recent efforts in discovering more Maya records in the Dresden Codex that can be identified with astronomical phenomena. We inspected pages D40-D42 and D60 of the Dresden Codex and found 21 new dates. These dates are given mostly in the Long Count, but also in Calendar Round Dates (i.e., by the dates in Tzolkin and Haab). We used the correlation (the difference between the Long Count and the Julian Date) determined in 1991 by the B & ouml;hm brothers (BB), and also the traditional correlation by Goodman, Martinez and Thompson (GMT) to convert Maya dates to the Julian calendar. Then we tried to identify both sets of calendar dates with real astronomical phenomena visible from the Maya territory. We succeeded in identifying them (conjunctions of all visible planets and greatest elongations of Mercury and Venus from the Sun) for all dates in the BB correlation, but we were not so successful for the GMT. Thus, this paper brings another important argument for using the BB correlation instead of the GMT to convert Maya dates from the Classical Period into our calendar. This is in agreement with several papers published during the past decades, in which it was demonstrated that the GMT correlation (preferred by many historians), is not able to identify astronomical events that occurred in the Classical Period of Maya civilization.
This paper presents, for the first time, 283 previously unpublished solar photographs obtained with the Vilnius Dallmeyer photoheliograph, the second instrument of its kind in the world, and the first constructed by John Henry Dallmeyer. Built in 1863 and installed at Vilnius Observatory in 1864 the instrument embodied key innovations in optics and mechanics, inspired by the earlier Kew model. Despite its promise, the program faced dramatic setbacks: the successive deaths of two Directors, Friedrich Sabler and Matwej Gussew, in 1865 and 1866, soon after the project was launched, and a devastating fire in 1876 that destroyed the Western Dome and the photoheliograph itself. Nevertheless, under the direction of Pavel Smyslov, regular solar imaging was conducted from 1868 to 1876, resulting in approximately 900 photographs. Of these, the 283 surviving images, long overlooked and previously unpublished, are here catalogued, ordered, and partly illustrated for the first time, providing a unique, continuous record of sunspot activity from this early period of solar photography. In a future study, we plan to analyze this dataset in detail, shedding new light both on nineteenth-century solar variability and on the development of early astrophotographic methods.
