4,285 research outputs found
No evidence for an early seventeenth-century Indian sighting of Keplers supernova (SN1604)
In a recent paper Sule et al. (Astronomical Notes, vol. 332 (2011), 655)
argued that an early 17th-century Indian mural of the constellation Sagittarius
with a dragon-headed tail indicated that the bright supernova of 1604 was also
sighted by Indian astronomers. In this paper it will be shown that this
identification is based on a misunderstanding of traditional Islamic
astrological iconography and that the claim that the mural represents an early
17th-century Indian sighting of the supernova of 1604 has to be rejected.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures. To appear in Astronomical Notes, vol. 334, issue
5 (2013), DOI number 1172
Three editions of the Star Catalogue of Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe completed his catalogue with the positions and magnitudes of 1004
fixed stars in 1598. This catalogue circulated in manuscript form. Brahe edited
a shorter version with 777 stars, printed in 1602, and Kepler edited the full
catalogue of 1004 stars, printed in 1627. We provide machine-readable versions
of the three versions of the catalogue, describe the differences between them
and briefly discuss their accuracy on the basis of comparison with modern data
from the Hipparcos Catalogue. We also compare our results with earlier analyses
by Dreyer (1916) and Rawlins (1993), finding good overall agreement. The
magnitudes given by Brahe correlate well with modern values, his longitudes and
latitudes have error distributions with widths of about 2 arcmin, with excess
numbers of stars with larger errors (as compared to Gaussian distributions), in
particular for the faintest stars. Errors in positions larger than 10 arcmin,
which comprise about 15 per cent of the entries, are likely due to computing or
copying errors.Comment: Accepted by Astronomy and Astrophysics; 24 pages; 63 figures; 3
machine readable tables made available at CD
The Star Catalogue of Hevelius
The catalogue by Johannes Hevelius with the positions and magnitudes of 1564
entries was published by his wife Elisabeth Koopman in 1690. We provide a
machine-readable version of the catalogue, and briefly discuss its accuracy on
the basis of comparison with data from the modern Hipparcos Catalogue. We
compare our results with an earlier analysis by Rybka (1984), finding good
overall agreement. The magnitudes given by Hevelius correlate well with modern
values. The accuracy of his position measurements is similar to that of Brahe,
with sigma=2 arcmin for with more errors larger than 5 arcmin than expected for
a Gaussian distribution. The position accuracy decreases slowly with magnitude.
The fraction of stars with position errors larger than a degree is 1.5 per
cent, rather smaller than the fraction of 5 per cent in the star catalogue of
Brahe.Comment: Accepted by Astronomy and Astrophysics; 23 pages; 62 figures; 1 table
made accessible via CD
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