Preservation of Our Astronomical Heritage: State of the Profession White Paper for Astro2020

We argue that it is essential that the Astro2020 survey of the present state of American astronomy and the recommendations for the next decade address the issue of ensuring preservation of, and making more discoverable and accessible, the field’s rich legacy materials. These include both archived observations of scientific value and items of historical importance. Much of this heritage likely will be lost if action is not taken in the next decade. It is proposed that the decadal plan include recommendations on (1) compiling a list of historic sites and development of models for their preservation, (2) carrying out a comprehensive inventory of astronomy’s archival material, and (3) digitizing, with web-based publication, those photographs and papers judged to have the most value for scientific and historical investigations. The estimated cost for an example project on plate preservation is a one-time investment of less than $10 million over ten years plus the typical on-going costs to maintain and manage a medium-sized database

Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology

Between Copernicus and Galileo is the story of Christoph Clavius, the Jesuit astronomer and teacher whose work helped set the standards by which Galileo's famous claims appeared so radical, and whose teachings guided the intellectual and scientific agenda of the Church in the central years of the Scientific Revolution. Though relatively unknown today, Clavius was enormously influential throughout Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries through his astronomy books—the standard texts used in many colleges and universities, and the tools with which Descartes, Gassendi, and M

The Milky Way and the Local Group

The beauty and the charm of the Milky May (MW) have been celebrated by countless poets and writers of many Countries along the centuries (see e.g. the beautiful anthology of Piero Boitani 2012 ). The stellar nature of the MW was firstly observed by Galileo. In 1610 in the Sidereus Nuncius ( Galilei 1993 ) Galileo wrote that the MW is “nient’altro che una congerie di innumerevoli Stelle, disseminate a mucchi; chè in qualunque regione di essa si diriga il cannocchiale, subito una ingente folla di Stelle si presenta alla vista, delle quali parecchi si vedono abbastanza grandi e molto distinte; ma la moltitudine delle piccole è del tutto inesplorabile”. In the same paragraph, Galileo remarked that observations with his telescope, for the first time, wipe out centuries of philosophical discussions about the nature of the MW. Three more centuries have been necessary to complete a second radical Copernican Revolution that displaces the solar system from being roughly at the center of the MW and project this latter in the vast Universe populated by billions of similar spiral galaxies (see Chap. 1)

Extragalactic Astronomy: From Pioneers to Big Science

At the beginning of the nineteenth century one of the scientific issues driving the research of astronomers, like the Herschels, was to test if all the nebulæ can be resolved into stars