Colonial American Astronomy

Details Colonial American Astronomy Colonial American Astronomy

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.3406y&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #34.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.787

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

While a foundation of German scientific methods enabled the rapid growth of North American Astronomy in the nineteenth century, during the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, the colonial men of science looked only to the English mother country for scientific patronage and guidance. An essay on fundamental astronomy appeared in one of the annual colonial almanacs as early as 1656, telescopic observations were made about 1660 and the first original colonial astronomical work was published by Thomas Danforth on the comet of 1664. By 1671 the Copernican ideas were so espoused at Harvard College that a physics class refused to read a Ptolemaic textbook when it was assigned to them by a senior instructor. At least in the Cambridge-Boston area, contemporary colonialist had access to the most recent scientific publications from the mother country. Observations of the great comet of 1680 by the Almanac maker, John Foster, reached Isaac Newton and were used and gratefully acknowledged in his Principia. During the seventeenth century the colonial interest in astronomy was more intense than it was for other sciences but colonists still occupied a position in the scientific backwater when compared with contemporary European scientists. Nevertheless, the science of astronomy was successfully transplanted from England to North America in the seventeenth century.

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