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Re-creating Galileo's Observations of Jupiter's 4 Large Moons

POSTED BY: Jeffrey Bryant
8 Replies
POSTED BY: EDITORIAL BOARD
Posted 9 years ago

Here's a scan of the original 1610 publication: https://archive.org/details/Sidereusnuncius00Gali

Jovian diagrams begin here at the bottom of the right-hand page: https://archive.org/stream/Sidereusnuncius00Gali#page/n39/mode/2up

POSTED BY: Bill White

If one is looking for yet another Saturday morning project, what about doing some image processing on cropped regions of the original prints to extract the typeset positions of the satellites, and then seeing what FindFormula is able to derive. Of course the amount of noise in the diagrams is atrocious.

POSTED BY: Matthias Odisio

I'm sure there are other translations out there, but this one turned up via a quick Google search:

http://people.reed.edu/~wieting/mathematics537/sideriusnuncius.pdf

If you scroll a little over half way through the document, you will see a number of his sketches. His description of time is a bit vague so I estimated about 6Pm Italy time (e.g. TimeZone -> 1);

JupiterSatellites[DateObject[{1610, 1, 13, 18, 0, 0}, TimeZone -> 1]]

enter image description here

enter image description here

This gives a view almost identical to what he described for Jan 13, 1610. Most of his observations refer to the "first hour of the night" and given its January, I'm assuming 6 PM local time would be a reasonable guess. Keep in mind that Galileo's telescope was very crude so its resolution was poor. If 2 moons were very close, he may not have been able to resolve them so this may appear to result in a discrepancy between what he describes and what the calculation show. But all the test cases I've done seem to be quite close.

POSTED BY: Jeffrey Bryant

Very impressive!! I see a lot of constants in the JovianMoonCoordinates function. Is the accuracy of these necessary to ensure these coordinates still work centuries later?

POSTED BY: Sander Huisman

The source doesn't specify a range of dates for which the results are valid, at least not in an obvious way. Often, additional references are given for some of the sub-computations. Its possible that if you do enough source spelunking, you might find an originating source that provides that level of analysis.

The first 17 or so variables in the first block of code are defined in chapter 43, while the remaining are in the following chapter 44.

POSTED BY: Jeffrey Bryant

Thanks for explaining

POSTED BY: Sander Huisman

Very nice. I never learned Latin. Can you correlate each of Galileo's drawings with a corresponding calculation or provide a translation?

Thanks!

POSTED BY: Kay Herbert
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