Illustrations for Edmund Weiss’s “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt “

Illustrations for Edmund Weiss’s “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt (Stellar Atlas)“, 1888-1892, Verlag von J.F. Schreiber, Stuttgart

Born at Freiwaldau, now Jeseník, a town in the Olomouc Region of the Czech Republic in August of 1837, Edmund Weiss was a professor and astronomer who became the director of the Vienna Observatory in 1878, a post he held until his retirement in 1910.

Born to hydrotherapy pioneer Josef Weiss and his wife, Edmund Weiss was the twin brother of noted botanist Adolf Gustav Weiss, Professor of Botany at Prague. Edmund Weiss spent his early years in Richmond, England where his father was the director of the hydrotherapy center at Stansteadbury in Hertfordshire. After his fathers death in 1847, Josef Weiss returned to his native land where he studied at the Gymnasium in Troppau, now Opava, from 1847 to 1855. He continued his education at the Vienna University with studies in mathematics, astronomy and physics.

On the completion of his studies, Weiss was appointed an assistant at the Vienna Observatory in 1858. While employed at the observatory, he continued his studies and was awarded in 1860 the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. As an assistant, Weiss was a diligent and skilled observer; he was noted for his accuracy in the measurement of a meridian arc during the period of 1864 to 1867. Although offered positions by astronomer Otto Wilhelm von Struve at the Pulkovo Observatory in Petrograd and chemist Adolf von Baeyer at Berlin’s Geodetic Institute, Weiss remained in Vienna where he received the title of honorary professor in 1869 and, in 1875, a full professorship.

In 1872, Edmund Weiss visited England and North America in order to study the leading observatories and new developments in optical works. The knowledge he gained was utilized at the building of a new observatory in the Vienna district of Währing as well as the purchase of its new instruments, among which were the 1882 twenty-seven inch equatorial by Dublin’s Grubb Telescope Company and an eleven three-quarter inch equatorial by Alvan Clark & Sons of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. The construction of the Währing observatory was overseen by its director Karl Ludwig Littrow who died before the observatory’s completion. Weiss was appointed its new Director in 1878 and retained that post until 1910 when he retired with the title Emeritus Director.

The detailed observations at the Währing Observatory were related to the planets, comets, occultations (the concealment of celestial bodies by another), variable stars and meteors. From these studies, Weiss published a large number of papers among which were those that examined the connection between comets and meteors, the meteor swarm of Halley’s Comet, the magnitude of minor planets, the nebulae in the Pleiades, and a method of obtaining True Anomaly and the radius vector of great orbital eccentricity. He published a new edition of astronomer Joseph Johann von Littrow’s popular “Die Wunder des Himmels (The Wonders of Heaven)” and, in 1890, a revised edition of Wilhelm Albrecht Oeltzen’s 1857 astronomical catalogue “Argelander’s Southern Zones”. Weiss also published a pictorial atlas of astronomy in German, the 1888-1892 “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt (Stellar Atlas)”.

Edmund Weiss made multiple journeys to observe astronomical phenomena, particularly eclipses. He observed the 1861 eclipse in Greece, that achieved just total before sunset; the 1867 annular (ring) eclipse from Dalmatia, Croatia; the 1868 total eclipse from Eden, Ireland; the total eclipse of 1870 from Tunis, Tunisia; and the 1874 Transit of Venus, the first of two transits in the nineteenth- century, from Jassy, Romania. These eclipse expeditions led to Weiss’s interest in solar physics and his membership with the International Union for Solar Research.

Weiss developed a high reputation in Vienna as a lecturer on astronomy. He was elected a Fellow of the Vienna Academy in 1878 and an Associate of the Society in 1883. Awarded the Bessemer Gold Medal in 1883, Edmund Weiss died at the age of seventy-nine in June of 1917 after a long and painful illness. He was survived by his wife Adelaide Fenzl and seven children. The “Weiss” lunar crater along the southern edge of the Mare Nubium was named after him.

Notes: It should be noted that Edmund Weiss is not the illustrator for the “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt”. If anyone locates the name of the artist, please make a note in the comment section.

An annular eclipse occurs when the Moon passes directly between the Earth and the Sun but does not completely cover the Sun’s disk, leaving the outer edge visible as a bright ring around the Moon.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Professor and Astronomer Edmund Weiss”, 1872, Vintage Photo

Second Insert Image: Edmund Weiss, Title Illustration, “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt”, 1888-1892, Verlag von J.F. Schreiber, Stuttgart

Bottom Insert Image: Edmund Weiss, “Uppenines at Sunrise”, Illustration for “Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt”, 1888-1892, Verlag von J.F. Schreiber, Stuttgart

Paul Manship

Paul Manship, “Actaeon”, 1925, Gilt Bronze, Alexis Rudier Fondeur, 120.7 x 130.8 x 33.7 cm, Cooper Hewitt Museum

Born in December of 1885 in St. Paul, Minnesota, Paul Manship was an American sculptor whose subjects and modern style were largely inspired by classical sculpture. After attending Mechanical Arts High School, he took evening classes at the St. Paul Institute School of Art from 1892 to 1903, but left to work as a designer and illustrator. In 1905 Manship enrolled briefly in the Art Students League in New York City under Hermon Atkins MacNeil, a sculptor trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Soon after his arrival to New York, Paul Manship became an assistant to stone sculptor Solon Borglum, whom he credited as the master who had most influenced him. With money saved, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1907-08 under sculptor Charles Grafly. Moving back to New York, Manship worked at the studio of Viennese sculptor Isidore Konti, where he modeled a decorative relief entitled “Man with Wild Horses”, later shown at the National Academy of Design in 1908.

In 1909 at the age of twenty-three, Paul Manship received a three-year scholarship, the coveted American Prix de Rome, to study at the American Academy in Rome. His early work was influenced by Rodin’s expressive style but, after traveling throughout Italy and Greece, he developed an appreciation for Hellenistic statues and for Egyptian, Assyrian, and Minoan artwork. This affinity for archaic work influenced Manship’s unified linear style of sculpture for which he is well known; his novel approach represented a break from the popular Beaux-Arts style of his former teachers.

After three years abroad, Manship settled in New York City in 1912, where he began a successful career that would last fifty years. His arresting sculptures, with their freely modeled simple forms and dramatic gestures, were in demand in the New York art world. In February of 1913 Manship had a solo exhibition of his work at New York’s Architectural League. An instant success with critics and the public, it resulted in many private and public commissions.

This success of Manship’s solo show was followed with two more exhibitions of his work in November of 1913, moving his career briskly forward. A show at the Berlin Photographic Company in 1914 resulted in the sale of almost one hundred of Manship’s bronze pieces. He was honored by his peers for this achievement with a gold medal at the San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915.

Some of Paul Manship’s most notable works are: the set of monumental bronze gates at the entrance to the New York Zoological Park in the Bronx area of New York, erected as a memorial to Paul Rainey; the Prometheus Fountain in Rockefeller Center, New York City, which ultimately became his signature work despite his disappointment with the subject; and the “Time and Fates Sundial” with the accompanying four “Moods of Time”, executed in plaster of Paris, for the reflecting pool of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City.

Paul Manship, at the top of his profession, was bestowed with many honors: membership in the Academia Nacional de las Bellas Artes in Argentina in 1944; membership in Paris’ Academie des Beaux-Arts in 1946; membership in l’Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1952, the gold medal for sculpture by the National Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City in 1945; membership in the French Legion of Honor; and election to president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1948.

“I’m not especially interested in anatomy, though naturally I’ve studied it. And, although I approve generally of normally correct proportions, what matters is the spirit which the artist puts into his creation—the vitality, the rhythm, the emotional effect.” —Paul Manship

Calendar: December 28

A Year: Day to Day Men: 28th of December

Wearing White Attire

December 28, 1612 was the date of the first observation of the planet Neptune. Galileo observed and recorded it as a nearby “fixed star”.

Galileo was observing the four large moons of Jupiter — now named for him — in the years 1612 and 1613. Over several nights, he also recorded in his notebook the position of a nearby star that is not in any modern catalogues, University of Melbourne’s physicist David Jamieson explains.

“It has been known for several decades that this unknown star was actually the planet Neptune,” Jamieson said. “Computer simulations show the precision of his observations revealing that Neptune would have looked just like a faint star almost exactly where Galileo observed it.” But unlike stars, planets orbit the sun. So planets move through our sky different than the relatively fixed background of stars.

On the night of Jan. 28, 1613, Galileo wrote in his notebook that the star we now know is the planet Neptune appeared to have moved relative to an actual nearby star. There was also a mysterious unlabeled black dot in his earlier observations of Jan. 6, 1613, which is in the right position to be Neptune.

If the mysterious black dot on Jan. 6 was actually recorded on Jan. 28, Professor Jamieson proposed this would prove that Galileo believed he may have discovered a new planet. “I believe this dot could reveal he went back in his notes to record where he saw Neptune earlier when it was even closer to Jupiter but had not previously attracted his attention because of its unremarkable star-like appearance”.

Calendar: December 18

Year: Day to Day Men: December 18

Locker Room Moment

On the 18th of December in 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed he had discovered fossilized remains of a previously unknown early human, the missing link between apes and man. This human ancestor was named Eoanthropus dawsoni, but became known as Piltdown Man from the gravel pit in which the remains were found.

Although there were doubts about its authenticity from early 1912, the Piltdown Man remains were widely accepted for many years. In November of 1953, Time magazine published evidence gathered by anthropologist Kenneth Oakley, primatologist Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, and biologist Joseph Weiner that proved the Piltdown Man was a forgery composed of three distinct species. This hoax was notable for the attention it generated on the subject of human evolution and the fact that it took forty-one years to its definitive exposure as a forgery.

In February of 1912, Dawson contacted the Keeper of Geology at London’s Natural History Museum, Arthur Smith Woodward, that he had found a section of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown, East Sussex. Later in the summer, Dawson and Woodward purportedly discovered a jawbone, skull fragments, a set of teeth, and primitive tools at the site. From the outset, the reconstruction of the skull was strongly challenged by researchers.

Waterston, Boule and Miller’s evidence proved the remains of the Piltdown Man was a forgery. The fossils consisted of a human skull of medieval age, a five-hundred year old lower jaw of an orangutan and fossil teeth from a chimpanzee. Someone had simulated age by staining the bones with an iron solution and chromic acid. A microscopic examination of the teeth showed file-marks that had modified the teeth to a shape more suited for human diet. The identity of the forger remains unknown; however the focus on Dawson is supported by evidence regarding other archaeological hoaxes he had perpetrated in the previous two decades.

Notes: The fossil was introduced as evidence by Clarence Darrow in defense of John T. Scopes during the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Darrow died in 1938, fifteen years before the Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud.

Calendar: December 16

A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of December

Observing the Street Below

The sixteenth of December marks the beginning of the 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a conical Italian volcano built up by many layers of hardened lava and unconsolidated material. The eruption, marked by columns of volcanic debris, ash and hot gases, buried many villages under the resulting lava flows. It is estimated that four-thousand people were killed by the eruption, which was so intense that it lowered the summit of Vesuvius by four hundred and fifty meters.

Located on the Gulf of Naples in Campania, Mount Vesuvius has a long historic and literary tradition. At the time of the 79 AD eruption, the volcano was considered a divinity of nature. The Roman cities surrounding the volcano regarded Mount Vesuvius as being devoted to Hercules. This was particularly true for the city of Herculaneum ,which was named after its mythical founder. Frescoes depicting Vesuvius as a serpent decorated many of the household shrines in Pompeii; inscriptions on walls linked the power of the god Jupiter to the volcano, IOVI VESVVIO, or Jupiter Vesuvius.

Mount Vesuvius has erupted multiple times with varying grades of severity. All of its eruptions included explosive outbursts named Plinian after the Roman writer Pliny the Younger, who published a detailed account of the 79 AD eruption that killed his uncle. That eruption was largest and most destructive of all Vesuvius eruptions. Its cloud of super-heated gases and particles reached a height of thirty-three kilometers. The molten rock, pumice and hot ash ejecta reached sped at a rate of one and a half million tons per second. This volcanic event destroyed several Roman towns and completely obliterated Pompeii and Herculaneum under massive pyroclastic surges and ash fall deposits.

Today, Mount Vesuvius is considered the world’s most dangerous volcano. This is due to two main factors: it has erupted violently and frequently through the years and the large number of people living in its vicinity. The area surrounding Mount Vesuvius is the most densely populated volcanic region in the world. Three million people live near enough to be affected by an eruption, with at least six-hundred thousand in the danger zone. Mount Vesuvius is among the most closely monitored volcanoes in the world. The network consists of a number of fixed seismic stations on the surface of the earth with sensors that detect the motion of the soil, changes in the gravimetric field and indicative shifts in the magnetic masses in the subsurface.

Calendar: December 14

A Year: Day to Day Men: 14th of December

Crouching in Socks and Sneakers

On the fourteenth of December in 1782, the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, performed the first test-flight of an unmanned hot air balloon in France.

The Montgolfier brothers were born into a family of paper manufacturers. Joseph-Michel was the twelfth child of Pierre Montgolfier and Anne Duret; Jacques-Étienne was the fifteenth child and was later sent to Paris to train as an architect. After the death of the eldest son who was his father’s business successor, Étienne was recalled from Paris to long the family’s paper manufacturing business.

Both Joseph-Michel and Étienne were talented innovators and inventors. Joseph-Michel invented the self-acting hydraulic ram in 1796 and Étienne founded the first paper-making vocational school in France. For their business, the brothers together invented a process to manufacture transparent paper vellum, suitable for use in situations where tracing was required. As avid balloonists, they invented the Montgolfière-style hot air balloon, a globe aèrostatique, with which Jacques Étienne made the first piloted ascent by humans in 1783.

Interested in aeronautics, Joseph-Michel had built parachutes as early as 1775. Watching the embers rising from a fire, he wondered is the same force could be used for a military air assault. Joseph-Michel believed that the smoke was the buoyant force which lifted the embers; from that assumption he preferred to use smoldering fuel for his experiments. He built a test structure of a very thin wood box with a light-weight taffeta cloth lid. After lighting crumbled paper in the box, the structure lifted off the stand and touched the ceiling.

After recruiting Étienne through an urgent message, the brothers built a similar structure but three times the size with a volume twenty-seven times greater. On December 14th of 1782, they ignited the wood and hay in the fire box; the lifting force was more than expected and they lost control of the craft. The device floated nearly two kilometers but was destroyed after landing by a passing citizen.

Calendar: December 12

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of December

The Library’s Leather Armchair

Born at Haggerston, Middlesex in November of 1656, Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist. Very interested in mathematics as a child, he studied at London’s St. Paul’s School where he developed an interest in astronomy. In July of 1673, Halley began studying at Queens’ College, Oxford where he was influenced by the work of the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed’s effort to catalogue the stars of the northern hemisphere. While still an under graduate, he published papers on the solar system and sunspots.

In 1676, Halley published his first paper about planetary orbits. He later dropped out of school to travel to the south Atlantic island of Saint Helena, west of Africa, to observe and chart the stars of the southern hemisphere with cross-references to the northern stars. Supported in his endeavor by King Charles II, he set up an observatory and observed a transit of Mercury across the Sun. From the solar parallax of the planet, he determined it was possible to trigonometrically to determine the distances between the Earth, Venus and the Sun.

Edmond Halley produced his chart of the southern stars and, with the assistance of Charles II, was awarded his Master of Arts degree from Oxford in December of 1678; a few days later, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-two. In September of 1682, Halley conducted a series of observations on what would be known as Halley’s Comet. Because of his work on the orbit, he was able to predict its return in 1758.

In 1691, Halley sought the post of Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. While a candidate, he faced the opposition of both John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, and the Anglican Church which questioned his religious views, specifically because he has questioned the Earth’s age as given in the Bible. Halley, also opposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. was unsuccessful in his attempt.

On December 12th in 1696, Edmond Halley was censured by the Royal Society for suggesting in a 1694 paper. titled “Some Considerations About the Cause of the Universal Deluge”, the story of Noah’s flood in the Bible could be an account of a cometary impact. It should be noted that a similar theory was suggested three centuries later; however, it has generally been rejected by geologists of the present day.

Halley eventually succeeded John Flamsteed as Astronomer Royal in 1720, a position he held until his death in 1742 at the age of eighty-five. He was interred at the old church of St. Margaret’s, Lee Terrace, Blackheath; he lies within the same vault as Astronomer Royal John Pond and close to the unmarked grave of Astronomer Royal Nathaniel Bliss.

Calendar: December 11

A Year: Day to Day Men; 11th of December

Handstand at Window

December 11 was the birthdate of American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon.

Born in Dover, Delaware to Wilson Cannon, a shipbuilder, and Mary Jump, Annie Jump Cannon was encouraged by her mother to follow her own interests and suggested studies in chemistry, biology and mathematics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Taught by her mother to identify stars at an early age, Cannon decided to pursue her love of astronomy. She also made the choice not to marry or bear children.

In 1880, Annie Cannon attended Wellesley College, one of the top academic schools for women, where she studied under Sarah Francis Whiting, one of the few women physicists in the United States at that time. Cannon graduated as the valedictorian of the college in 1884 with a degree in physics. She returned for a decade to Delaware where she developed skills in the new art of photography. Cannon traveled through Europe in 1892 taking photographs, later published along with her prose in a pamphlet, “In the Footsteps of Columbus”. This pamphlet was later used as a souvenir for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Stricken with scarlet fever, Cannon became nearly deaf and immersed her self in her work. She became a junior physics teacher at Wellesley College in 1894 and took graduate courses in both physics and astronomy. In order to gain access to a more powerful telescope, Cannon enrolled at Radcliffe College as a special student; she was able to attend lectures by Harvard professors and gained access to the Harvard College Observatory. In 1896 Cannon was hired as an assistant to the observatory’s astronomer and physicist Edward C. Pickering. In 1907, she graduated with her Masters Degree from Wellesley in 1907.

In 1896, Annine Cannon became a member of Pickering’s Harvard Computers, a group whose goal was to complete the Henry Draper Catalogue, a mapping and definition of every star in the sky to a photographic magnitude of nine. When Cannon first started cataloging stars, she was able to classify one- thousand stars in three years. By 1013, she was able to accurately classify two-hundred stars an hour by looking at their spectral patterns.

Cannon is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperature and spectral types. She initially started by examining stars in the southern hemisphere and divided them into the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M based on the Balmer absorption lines that describe the spectral line emissions of the hydrogen atom. After this was understood, her initial classification system was rearranged to avoid updating previous star catalogues.

In 1911, Annie Jump Cannon was made Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard. Three years later, she became an honorary member of England’s Royal Astronomical Society. In 1922, the International Astronomical Society adopted Cannon’s classification system; except for a few minor changes, it is the basis of star classification to this date. Throughout her forty year career, Cannon manually classified more stars in a lifetime then anyone else, a total of approximately three-hundred and fifty thousand stars.

Calendar: December 7

A Year: Day to Day Men: 7th of December

Doffed Pants of Purple Hue

On December 7th in 1995, the unmanned Galileo spacecraft arrived at the planet Jupiter on its mission to study the planet and its moons. It had been launched six years earlier by the Space Shuttle Atlantis on October 18th of 1989.

The Galileo was an American robotic space probe which consisted of an orbiter and an entry probe. It was named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. Called the father of observational astronomy, Galilei studied speed, velocity, gravity and free fall, inertia, projectile motion and the principle of relativity. He also improved military compasses and the telescope that he used to observe the four largest satellites of Jupiter.

The U. S. Jet Propulsion Laboratory built the Galileo spacecraft and managed the Galileo program for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. Its propulsion unit was supplied by West Germany’s aerospace manufacturer Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm. The Ames Research Center of NASA managed the atmospheric probe that was built by the Hughes Aircraft company. The combined mass of the orbiter and probe was 2,562 kilograms and had a height of 6.15 meters.

The nuclear powered Galileo orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. After ten months of operating and sending information to Earth, the Galileo was intentionally destroyed in Jupiter’s atmosphere on the 21st of September in 2003. Its successor, Juno, part of the New Frontiers program, entered the polar orbit of Jupiter on the 5th of July in 2016. The Juno is powered by three solar panels, the largest ever deployed on a planetary probe at the time of its launching.

Calendar: November 24

A Year: Day to Day Men: 24th of November

One Facet of Life

November 24, 1639 marks the first known observation and recording of a transit of Venus.

By the 17th century, two developments allowed for the transits of planets across the face of the sun to be predicted and observed. One was the telescope of which the actual inventor is unknown; a patent for a refracting telescope was submitted in 1608 in the Netherlands by spectacle maker Hans Lippershey. Galileo heard about it, and in 1609 built his own version for observing celestial objects.

The second development was the new astronomy of Johannes Kepler, which assumed elliptical rather than circular orbits fro the planets. In 1627, Kepler published his “ Rudolphine Tables”, a star catalogue and planetary tables using some observational data collected by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Two years later, Kepler published extracts from his tables concerning the transit of Mercury and of Venus for the year 1631. These occurred as predicted and were observed by several astronomers, vindicating Kepler’s approach to astronomical theory.

The first known observations and recording of the transit of Venus across the sun were made in 1639 by the English astronomers Jeremiah Horrocks and his friend and correspondent William Crabtree. These observations were made on November 24, under the Julian calendar then in use in England. This calendar was refined and gradually replaced by our Gregorian calendar initiated by Pope Gregory XIII, changing the observation date to December 4th of that year. Horrocks observed the event from the village of Much Hoole, Lancashire, and Crabtree, independently, observed the event from his home in Broughton, near Manchester.

Both men, followers of Kepler’s astronomy, were self-taught mathematical astronomers who methodically worked to correct and improve Kepler’s Tables by observation and measurement. In 1639, Horrocks was the only astronomer who realized that the transit of Venus was imminent; others became aware only upon receiving Horrocks’s report. The two men’s observations and later mathematical work were influential in establishing the size of the solar system. For their achievements, they are considered the founders fo British research astronomy.

Insert Image: Ford Madox Brown, “Crabtree Watching the Transit of Venus AD 1639”, 1883, Oil on Canvas, Manchester Town Hall, Manchester, England

Calendar: March 13

Year: Day to Day Men: March 13

Perched

The thirteenth of March in 1930 marks the discovery of Pluto, the ninth largest and tenth most massive known object to directly orbit the sun of this system. Like other objects in the Kulper belt, the circumstellar disc in the outer solar system, Pluto primarily consists of rock and frozen volatiles such as methane, ammonia and water.

In the 1840s, French astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier used Newtonian mechanics to predict the position of the, as yet, undiscovered planet Neptune after analyzing deviations in the orbit of Uranus. Subsequent observations of Neptune in the late 1800s led astronomers to speculate that Uranus’s orbit was being affected by another planet beside Neptune.

In 1906, wealthy astronomer and mathematician Percival Lowell began an extensive project at the Lowell Observatory to search for a possible ninth planet, that he termed Planet X. Lowell and astronomer William H. Pickering had by 1909 suggested several possible celestial coordinates for this Planet X. Lowell continued his search, with calculations established by mathematical genius Elizabeth Langdon Williams, without any success until his death in 1916.

Unknown to Lowell, his research surveys had captured two faint images of Pluto on March 19th and April 7th of 1915; however, these images were not recognized as being of Pluto. There exists fourteen other known observations of Pluto which predate its discovery, the earliest being that of the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory on the 20th of August in 1909.

In 1919, Percival Lowell’s widow, Constance Lowell, entered into a ten-year legal battle with the Lowell Observatory over her husband’s legacy. The search for the unknown planet did not resume until 1929. American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, at the age of twenty-three, continued Lowell’s quest. His task was to systematically image the night sky in pairs of photographs. Each pair would be examined to determine if any objects had shifted position. This was done through the use of a blink comparator that shifts back and forth between photographs to create the illusion of movement for any object that had changed position in the photographs.

On the 18th of February in 1930, after a year of searching, Tombaugh detected a possible moving object on the photographic plates taken on January 23rd and 29th. A photograph of lesser quality taken on the 21st helped confirm the movement. After the Lowell Observatory had taken additional photographs to confirm the discovery, a telegram with the news was sent to the Harvard College Observatory on the 13th of March in 1930.

The name Pluto came from the Roman god of the underworld; it is also an epithet for Hades, the Greek equivalent of Pluto. As one Plutonian year corresponds to 247.94 Earth years, Pluto will be back in the same position of its discovery in 2178. On the twenty-ninth of July in 2005, astronomers at Caltech announced the discovery of a new trans-Neptunian object, named Eris, which is substantially more massive than Pluto and the most massive object discovered in the solar system since Neptune’s moon, Triton, in 1846.

Calendar: March 7

Year: Day to Day Men: March 7

Gold Pinstripes

The seventh of March in the year 1837 marks the birth date of American physician and amateur astronomer Henry Draper. Both a professor and Dean of Medicine at City University of New York, he was one of the pioneers in the field of astrophotography.

Born to John William Draper, a professor at New York University, and Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, daughter of the royal physician to the Emperor of Brazil, Henry Draper completed all his medical courses at the City University of New York’s School of Medicine by the age of twenty. Too young to graduate, he toured Europe for a year and became acquainted with the work of Irish astronomer William Parsons, Third Earl of Rosse. Draper’s interest in photography and the Earl of Rosse’s observatory would later become the basis of his career.

On his return from Europe, Draper received his Medical Degree and began working as a physician at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital. In 1860, he received appointment at the City University of New York as Professor of Natural Science. Draper joined the Twelfth New York Infantry Regiment’s S Company in May of 1862 as a surgeon during the Civil War. His brother, John Christopher Draper, joined him as an assistant surgeon; they served together as surgeons until October in 1862. Draper became Chairman of the Department of Physiology at City University in 1866.

Henry Draper met Mary Anna Palmer, the daughter of Connecticut merchant and real estate investor Courtlandt Palmer, and married her in 1867. A well-educated woman, Mary Anna Draper collaborated with her husband in his expeditions, research and photography. Upon her father’s death in 1872, she became heir, along with her three brothers, to her father’s fortune. Henry and Mary Anna Draper relocated to their summer home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where they constructed an observatory with a 71 cm (28 inch) reflecting telescope and began a fifteen-year research partnership.

Interested in the application of photography to astronomy, Draper started making daguerrotypes of the sun and moon; however in 1872, he succeeded for the first time in photographing the stellar spectrum of the star Vega. Draper discovered in 1879 that the newly developed dry-photographic plates were more sensitive and convenient than the older wet-collodion ones. By 1882 with the use of the newer photographic plates, he was able to obtain over a hundred stellar spectra images, including those of the Moon, Mars, Jupiter (1880) and the Orion Nebula. Draper also succeeded in directly photographing the Orion Nebula, first in September of 1880 with a fifty-minute exposure and later with a one hundred-forty minute exposure though the use of a more accurate clock-driven telescope.

In 1882, Henry Draper resigned from City University to concentrate on his astrophotographic work for which he hoped to obtain higher resolution images. On the twentieth of November in 1882, Draper suffered an untimely death at the age of forty-five from double pleurisy, an inflammation of the membranes that surround the lungs and line the chest cavity.

After his death, Mary Anna Draper funded the Henry Draper Award of the National Academy of Sciences for outstanding contributions to astrophysics. She founded the Henry Draper Memorial Fund which financed the famous Henry Draper Catalogue, a nine-volume collection published between 1918 and 1924 that contains spectra details of two hundred twenty-five thousand stars. Draper’s donations enabled astronomer Edward Charles Pickering to continue his classification of stars based on their spectra. She also funded the construction of the Mount Wilson Observatory as well as ongoing research at the Harvard Observatory.

Calendar: March 6

Year: Day to Day Men: March 6

Embossed in Every Song

The sixth of March in 1665 marks the publishing of the first journal in the world exclusively devoted to science. Published under the name “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society”, this journal of natural philosophy, the equivalent of what is today science, is also the world’s longest published scientific journal.

The first issue of “Transactions”, printed in London, was edited and published by the Royal Society’s first secretary Henry Oldenberg. The Society had resolved that the council’s minutes be composed by the secretary and printed on the first Monday of every month; any tracts published were to be revised before publication and became the property of the Royal Society. Oldenberg printed the journal at his own personal expense and was allowed by the society to retain any resulting profits. He published one hundred-thirty six issues of the “Transactions” with no financial gain except the cost of rent on his house.

The “Transactions” was a well-regulated scientific journal. At its inception, regulation in the form of registering the author and date, peer review, dissemination and archiving published articles were all implemented. Oldenberg envisioned the published journal as a collective notebook between scientists to examine new ideas and discoveries. Issue number one contained articles on the improvement of optic glasses, the first report on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, new whale fishing in the Bermudas, and chemist Robert Boyle’s article “Experimental History of Cold”.

Although many readers saw the journal as the official periodical of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenberg always claimed that “Transactions” was entirely his sole enterprise. From this understanding, Oldenberg retained the prospect of financial gain and credibility by association, and the Royal Society enjoyed communicating advances in science without being directly responsible for its content. It should be understood that at this time in England, publications were heavily regulated and the idea of a free press did not exist. The first English newspaper, The London Gazette, at its appearance in November of 1665 was still an official organ of the government.

In 1752, the Royal Society took control of the “Philosophical Transactions” and, as such, published it for the sole use and benefit of the society. The journal was financed through membership’s subscriptions and was edited by the society’s Committee of Papers. Although the society’s secretaries were responsible for management decisions such as printing and distribution, editorial control was done through the Committee of Papers’s weekly meetings. Records were kept regarding the authors, the source of the work, and the date the scientific paper was presented to the committee.

Over the years, controls on membership to the Royal Society as well as the articles published in its journal became stricter. Both a more limited membership to protect the society’s reputation and a stricter peer review of articles were established. In 1887, the “Transactions” journal was separated into two categories, physical science and biological science. Sectional committees were established to cover mathematics, botany, zoology, physiology, geology as well as chemistry and physics. From 1896, authors were expected to present manuscripts in a standardized format and style; typed papers were later required to reduce errors in and speed up the process of printing.

Today “Transactions” is an established, world-wide scientific journal with about eighty-per cent of its peer-reviewed articles coming from non-United Kingdom authors. The editing is accomplished through a large professional in-house staff with a group of research Fellows assigned for each category of science. The role of the Committee of Papers was abolished and two Fellows now act as journal editors assisted by associate editors from each category. In 1997, the “Transactions” began to be published online. Articles throughout its history have included Isaac Newton’s “New Theory about Light and Colors”, Michael Faraday’s “Experimental Relations of Gold and Other Metals to Light” and Alan Turing’s 1952 “On the Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis”, among others.

Calendar: February 29

Year: Day to Day Men: February 29

Mediterranean Adventure

The twenty-ninth day of February in 1912 marks the falling of the Piedra Movediza, a balancing rock that was located near the city of Tandil in the Buenos Aires Province of Argentina. A balancing rock, or precarious boulder, is a naturally occurring geological formation that features a large rock of substantial size which is resting on other rocks, glacial fill, or bedrock. No single scientific term for the phenomenon exists.

There are several types of geological features that are included under the term balancing rock: glacial erratic that are transported and deposited by glaciers or ice rafts to their resting place; perched blocks deposited due to glaciers, avalanches or landslides often on a slope or hillside; erosional remnants that are carved from local bedrock through extensive wind, water, or chemical erosion; and pedestal rock, a single continuous rock form with a very small base and a much larger crown. Although not a true balancing rock, a pedestal rock has the appearance of one. These rocks are now believed to have been formed through years of wind and chemical weathering of its base.

The Piedra Movediza was most likely a deposited boulder; it was situated balanced at the edge of a formation of bedrock. Its weight was approximately three-hundred tons, or 272.2 metric tons, and its pedestal was so thin that the boulder was balanced with the wind. The boulder rocked, imperceptible to the eye, from morning to evening in a extremely slow fashion. Visitors to the site would place bottles under the bottom of the rock only to see them broken later in the day.

The Piedra Movediza fell and broke on the twenty-ninth of February in 1912, some time between five o’clock and six o’clock in the evening. There were no witnesses to the event so the true time and cause of the fall are unknown. Several theories regarding its fall were presented among which were vibrations from a nearby quarry blast, people rocking the stone during the day, and disgruntled quarrymen weary of the tourists. No official reason for the fall, however, was ever issued.

Proposals were made to move the three segments of the broken boulder back to its original site on the hill and cement them into position; however nothing was done, most likely due to the mass of each segment. In 2007, a replica of the Piedra Movediza was placed in the original site, now considered a historical symbol of the city of Tandil. The replica does not move as it is securely fastened to the supporting bedrock. This original bouder site is now named Parque Litico La Movediza (La Movediza Lithic Park).

Balancing rocks are found world-wide on all continents. Among these are Finland’s seven-meter long Kummakivi in Ruokolahti, Zimbawe’s Balancing Rocks, a large-scale formation of igneous rocks perfectly balanced; the nine-meter tall Pinnacle Balanced Rock at the Chiricahua National Monument in Arizona, United States; and the Pena do Equilibrio, a giant granite balancing rock in Ponteareas, Spain.

Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “The Piedra Movediza”, circa 1890, Vintage Print

Calendar: February 18

Year: Day to Day Men: February 18

The Pose

The eighteenth of February in 1838 marks the birth date of Austrian-Czech physicist and philosopher Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach. Due to his contributions to the physics of shock waves, the ratio of the speed of flow or object to the speed of sound is named the Mach number in his honor.

Born at the village of Brno-Chrlice in South Moravia, a part of the Austrian Empire, Ernst Mach was educated at home by his parents until the age of fourteen. He studied for three years at a secondary school in the city of Kroměříž. In 1855, Mach enrolled at the University of Vienna where he studied physics and medical physiology. In 1860, he received his doctorate in physics under Austrian physicist and mathematician Andreas von Ettingshausen, the first to design an electromagnetic machine which used its electrical induction for power generation.

In 1864, Mach turned down the chairman of surgery position at the University of Salzburg to accept a professorship of mathematics at the University of Graz, the second largest and oldest university in Austria. Two years later, Mach was appointed Professor of Physics at the university. In that position, he continued his work in psychophysics, a field that investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. In 1867, Mach became the chair of experimental physics at Prague’s Charles-Ferdinand University, a position he held for twenty-eight years before returning to Vienna.

Ernst Mach’s primary contribution to the science of physics were his photographs and descriptions of spark shock waves as well as the later studies of ballistic shock waves. Using the technique of schlieren photography, Mach and his son Ludwig photographed the shadows of the invisible shock waves. Invented in 1864 by German physicist August Toepler, schlieren photography is, essentially, a process of photographing fluid flows by measuring the spatial variations in the intensity of a light source shining on or from behind the target object.

Mach’s initial studies in experimental physics was primarily on the refraction, polarization, diffraction and interference of light in different media and under external influences. Further explorations dealt with supersonic fluid mechanics. In a collaboration with photographer Peter Salcher, Mach presented a 1887 paper on his research that correctly described the sound effects observed during the supersonic motion of a projectile. They confirmed the existence of a shock wave of conical shape with the projectile at the apex. The ratio of the speed of a fluid to the local speed of sound (Vp/Vs) is called the Mach number in honor of his work in the field. This ratio is a critical parameter in the description of high-speed fluid movement in the fields of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics.

Ernst Mach also made many contributions to the fields of psychology and physiology. Among these are his discovery of the oblique effect, the relative deficiency in the perception of oblique contours as compared to vertical or horizontal contours. Mach formed an experiment in which he placed a line to make it appear parallel to an adjoining one. Errors in the observer’s perception occurred least for horizontal or vertical orientations and largest when the lines were set at an incline of forty-five degrees. Mach’s experiment showed a perceptible change in the appearance of an object occurs with a forty-five degree rotation.

Another contribution by Mach to the field of sensory perception was the study of effects caused by the optical illusion known as Mach bands. Through this illusion, he explored the edge detection ability of the human visual system. The Mach bands exaggerate the contrast between edges of slightly differing shades of gray as soon as they touch. From this study, Mach made a distinction between what he called the physiological space, specifically visual, and geometrical space.

Ernst Mach survived a paralytic stroke in 1898. He retired form the University of Vienna three years later and received an appointment to the upper chamber of the Austrian Parliament. In 1913, Mach left Vienna and moved to his son Ludwig’s home in Vaterstetten in Upper Bavaria near Münich. Ernst Mach continued his writing and correspondence until his death in February of 1916 at the age of seventy-eight.