St. Helena, Edmond Halley, the discovery of stellar proper motion, and the mystery of Aldebaran

Details St. Helena, Edmond Halley, the discovery of stellar proper motion, and the mystery of Aldebaran St. Helena, Edmond Halley, the discovery of stellar proper motion, and the mystery of Aldebaran

Jul 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010jahh...13..149b&link_type=abstract

Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage (ISSN 1440-2807), Vol. 13, No. 2, p. 149 - 158 (2010).

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

St. Helena, Edmond Halley, Proper Motion, Aldebaran

Scientific paper

St. Helena was the location of Halley's observatory in 1677-1678. The site has been identified and I report on a visit in November 2006. The principal use of the observatory was to accurately map the stars of the southern sky. In the summary of his work, the Catalogus Stellarum Australium, Halley noted evidence for the "... mutability of the fixed Stars." He would not return to this subject until much later in his career. Halley later compared contemporary positions of Arcturus, Sirius, and Aldebaran with the ancient positions recorded in the Almagest. He found that these stars had apparently moved southward by >30' and concluded that they 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 are aware of the problem, it generally is not mentioned in books on the history of astronomy or in biographical works on Halley. Errors in the Almagest positions can be ruled out; an error of 30' in the early eighteenth century position is highly unlikely; a misidentification of the star is implausible; and, we are left with the conclusion that there is most likely an error in Halley's calculations.

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