Halley's Discovery of Stellar Proper Motion: The Aldebaran Problem

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

Halley (1717) compared contemporary positions of Arcturus, Sirius, and Aldebaran with the ancient positions recorded in the Almagest (Book VII 3) and attributed to Timocharis, Hipparcus, and Ptolemy. He found that these stars had apparently moved southward by more than 30 arc minutes and concluded that these stars had their own particular motions. Modern proper motion measurements are consistent with this conclusion for Arcturus and Sirius, but are not even close for Aldebaran. While some authors (Fomenko et al. 1993; Evans 1998) are aware of the problem, it generally is not mentioned in books on the history of astronomy (e.g., Clerke 1908; Pannekoek 1961; Neugebauer 1975) or in the major biographies of Halley (Armitage 1966; Ronan 1969; Lancaster-Brown 1985; Cook 1998). None of the possibilities for resolving this problem_errors in the ancient and/or the 17th-18th century positions; errors in Halley's calculations; or misidentification of the star--- seem plausible and final resolution may require locating the original calculations in Halley's papers.

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