120-Year-Old Photos of Space Were Just Discovered in a Basement

[zorgon]

120-Year-Old Photos of Space Were Just Discovered in a Basement

They're being used to show how space has changed in the last century.

BY JAY BENNETT
JAN 1, 2016
584
A retired Danish astronomer recently stumbled upon a treasure trove of astronomical observations from the late 19th Century. The oldest images, taken from the Østervold Observatory telescope when it was first built in 1895, are from a time when astronomers thought the universe was 400,000 years old and had yet to discover galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

"One day when I went down to the basement to make a cup of tea, I noticed some cardboard boxes from the Østervold Observatory," said Holger Pedersen, who still visits the Niels Bohr Institute frequently to work on research projects. "They had been moved there when the observatory was shut down many years ago. The boxes were full of cartons, so I took them up to the office to take a closer look at them."

In the boxes were about 300 photographic glass plates taken at Østervold. The plates are in surprisingly good condition and include early photographs of eclipses, Jupiter, binary stars, the Orion Nebula, the star Deneb, and many other celestial objects. The images range from an 1896 lunar eclipse to a 1957 photograph of the comet Arend-Roland.

Of particular interest is an image of the May 19, 1919 solar eclipse that Arthur Eddington used to prove Einstein's theory of relativity (shown above). The English astronomer traveled to Brazil to photograph the eclipse. As the moon blocked the light from the sun, stars in the background came into focus. Eddington compared the positions of these stars in the photograph of the eclipse to photographs of the same stars without the sun in front of them. As Einstein predicted, the gravity of the sun did indeed bend the light from these distant stars.

For modern astronomers, some of these images could prove an invaluable resource for understanding how the sky has changed over the last century. Some plates contain the only photographs of specific objects from the time.

"It is astronomy archaeology," said Pedersen.

From: Popular Mechanics

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a18779/120-year-old-astronomy-images-found-basement/

Original source

http://www.science.ku.dk/english/press/news/2015/astronomy-archaeology--finding-120-year-old-observations/

[space otter]

also


http://www.livescience.com/53173-historic-astronomy-photos-found.html



lunar eclipse, Feb. 28, 1896, taken at Copenhagen University's observatory at Østervold. This is one of around 300 'lost' glass plates recently discovered in the Niels Bohr Institute's basement.
Credit: Niels Bohr Institute
View full size image

Many of the fragile plates are yet to be unwrapped, but the majority of the images seen to date were captured by the University of Copenhagen Observatory on Østervold telescope, which was installed in 1895. A number of the photo plates date to the telescope's first years of operation. [See Photos: 'Lost' Astronomy Plates Show Historic Eclipse and More]
http://www.livescience.com/53170-photo-gallery-lost-astronomy-plates.html










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yep we have dumbed down a lot..sigh...

tons of embedded links in article.. a lot of my old astrology books have mentions of this


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/demon-star-ancient-egypt_56817de0e4b06fa68880ba3e?utm_hp_ref=science&ir=Science&section=science


? 12/29/2015 11:36 am ET
Jacqueline Howard


This Is The Earliest Known Reference To The 'Demon Star'
Ancient Egyptians appear to have tracked the bright-to-dim cycles of the distant star system with the naked eye.


Sitting about 93 light-years away from us in the constellation of Perseus is the pair of bright stars named Algol, also known collectively as the "Demon Star."

The stars orbit and eclipse each other, causing variations in brightness and dimming as regular as clockwork -- so much so that this cycle, which can be seen with the naked eye, may have been used to regulate ancient Egyptians' Cairo Calendar, or CC.

A new study offers a possible explanation of how the "demon star" would have been used to keep track of days in the calendar, providing evidence that ancient Egyptians were the first to describe this elusive star.

"First of all, they discovered Algol 3,000 years before modern astronomers," Dr. Lauri Jetsu, a researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland and lead author of the study, told The Huffington Post. "Secondly, they used this information in constructing the prognoses of CC. The moon and Algol had religious meanings to them. Of these, the role of Algol is something completely new."




Lauri Jetsu

The papyrus Cairo 86637 calendar is the oldest preserved historical document of naked-eye observations of the variable star Algol. Inside the superimposed rectangle is the hieratic writing for the word "Horus," which means a god or a king.


The researchers analyzed the text of the ancient Cairo Calendar found on a papyrus (above) that dates to sometime between 1244 and 1163 B.C.

The CC, like other ancient Egyptian calendars, aimed to predict which days of the year would be "lucky" and which would be "unlucky." The researchers' analysis found that the 2.85-day period of the CC's lucky days strongly correlates with the Algol's bright-to-dim cycle during that same time in history. The researchers also found correlations between the CC's pattern of days and the cycle of the Earth's moon.

All of this suggests that ancient Egyptians not only noticed the star, but also observed that it had a regular dimming pattern.

"They probably noticed that their constellation containing Algol changed," Jetsu said. "It is the star where it is easiest to discover periodic variability with naked eyes."

Sebastian Porceddu, a Ph.D. student at the University of Helsinki and a co-author of the study, told HuffPost that Algol is either the only star, or one of just two or three stars, that the ancient Egyptians monitored for their variability in brightness.

"This variability was considered strange and threatening behavior from a star they considered a divine being," Porceddu said. "We were rather surprised to find the period of Algol in the Cairo Calendar because it wasn't known beforehand that this star would have had mythological properties to the ancient Egyptians."

It was previously thought that Italian astronomer Geminiano Montanari discovered Algol in the late 1660s, but the researchers concluded that the "demon star" was discovered much earlier -- and that the ancient Egyptian papyrus is the oldest preserved historical document that references a variable star like Algol.

The study, which was published in the journal PLOS One on Dec. 17, further supports the researchers' previous studies suggesting that ancient Egyptians tracked the eclipsing binary star.