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2: Observing the Sky - The Birth of Astronomy

Today, few people really spend much time looking at the night sky. In ancient days, before electric lights robbed so many people of the beauty of the sky, the stars and planets were an important aspect of everyone’s daily life. All the records that we have—on paper and in stone—show that ancient civilizations around the world noticed, worshipped, and tried to understand the lights in the sky and fit them into their own view of the world. These ancient observers found both majestic regularity and never-ending surprise in the motions of the heavens. Through their careful study of the planets, the Greeks and later the Romans laid the foundation of the science of astronomy.

• 2.1: The Sky Above
The direct evidence of our senses supports a geocentric perspective, with the celestial sphere pivoting on the celestial poles and rotating about a stationary Earth. We see only half of this sphere at one time, limited by the horizon; the point directly overhead is our zenith. The Sun’s annual path on the celestial sphere is the ecliptic—a line that runs through the center of the zodiac, which is the 18-degree-wide strip of the sky within which we always find the Moon and planets.
• 2.2: Ancient Astronomy
Ancient Greeks such as Aristotle recognized that Earth and the Moon are spheres, and understood the phases of the Moon, but because of their inability to detect stellar parallax, they rejected the idea that Earth moves. Eratosthenes measured the size of Earth with surprising precision. Hipparchus carried out many astronomical observations, making a star catalog, defining the system of stellar magnitudes, and discovering precession from the shift in the position of the north celestial pole
• 2.3: Astrology vs. Astronomy
The ancient religion of astrology, with its main contribution to civilization a heightened interest in the heavens, began in Babylonia. It reached its peak in the Greco-Roman world, especially as recorded in the Tetrabiblos of Ptolemy. Natal astrology is based on the assumption that the positions of the planets at the time of our birth, as described by a horoscope, determine our future. However, modern tests clearly show that there is no evidence for this, even in a broad statistical sense.
• 2.4: The Birth of Modern Astronomy
Nicolaus Copernicus introduced the heliocentric cosmology to Renaissance Europe in his book De Revolutionibus. Although he retained the Aristotelian idea of uniform circular motion, Copernicus suggested that Earth is a planet and that the planets all circle about the Sun, dethroning Earth from its position at the center of the universe. Galileo was the father of both modern experimental physics and telescopic astronomy.
• 2.E: Observing the Sky - The Birth of Astronomy (Exercise)

Thumbnail: In this panoramic photograph of the night sky from the Atacama Desert in Chile, we can see the central portion of the Milky Way Galaxy arcing upward in the center of the frame. On the left, the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud (smaller galaxies that orbit the Milky Way Galaxy) are easily visible from the Southern Hemisphere. (credit: modification of work by ESO/Y. Beletsky)