Friday, July 10, 2009

Galileo, Neptune & Palomar

Neptune imaged in 2006 with the Hale Telescope & adaptive optics by Don Banfield of Cornell University

There are some stories in the news this week about the fact that Galileo spotted Neptune back in 1613. I didn't think that this was news. Former Palomar astronomer Charles Kowal made that discovery thirty years ago.

You can read his paper on this here and see that he and Stillman Drake published this in Nature back in 1980. Thanks to Palomar Skies commenter Anonymous for prodding me to post this for all.
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1 comment:

  1. AnonymousNovember 11, 2009 at 9:06 PM

    Jamieson is not suggesting that Galileo's recording of the position of Neptune, in his notebooks, had been unknown previously, but that there may be a way to determine whether Galileo knew that the object he'd recorded was a new planet.

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