Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jun 1992
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1992isis...83..195w&link_type=abstract
Isis, Vol. 83, No. 2, p. 195 - 217
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
The authors present the following conclusion. Galileo was not alone in his ambivalent attitude toward visual communication in astronomy. His attitude was shared by his contemporaries. In fact, the use of visual evidence is surprisingly rare until after 1640. And when astronomers finally began using pictorial evidence, they did so with an explicit commitment to representing the heavens faithfully and accurately. Although Francesco Fontana was the first to publish an astronomical book in which pictorial information was central, it is in the work of Johannes Hevelius (1611 - 1687), a university trained brewer in the Polish city of Gdansk, that we see the new visual dimension of telescopic astronomy best exemplified. Hevelius's Selenographia sive lunae descriptio of 1647 contained figures of forty different lunar phases, four views of the full moon, eighty-three diagrams, and several illustrations of his equipment and the appearances of other heavenly bodies. What is even more interesting, Hevelius made his own telescopes and, he himself engraved virtually every illustration - diagram or picture - in the book, thus combining the roles of the natural philosopher and the lowly artisan. Hevelius's approach to representing the heavens was so different from Galileo's that he utterly misunderstood the purpose behind the views of the moon shown in Sidereus nuncius. Such a completely wrongheaded judgment of Galileo's instruments and his ability as an observer and draftsman shows just how different the worlds of these two men were. When, within the range of media available to them, Hevelius and others chose to make the visual component central in communicating their observations, astronomy became a visual science.
van Helden Albert
Winkler M. G.
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