Abstract
This book contains the proceedings of an international conference held at Durham University in 2011 to celebrate not only Richard Stephenson’s seventeenth birthday but, most importantly, his many research contributions to the history of astronomy. In 2014, Stephenson was named the ninth recipient of the American Astronomical Society’s highest award, the LeRoy Doggett Prize, for his monumental efforts spanning over four decades to search ancient records of astronomical observations and to apply that information to problems in contemporary astronomy and geophysics, most notably to the long-term changes in the Earth’s daily rotation rate. Stephenson is the author or editor of 10 books and over 200 papers, of which some 30 have appeared in this journal.
This book contains 17 new research papers from more than 20 authors from 12 countries, many of them either professional colleagues or former students, or both, of Stephenson, himself a co-author on four of the papers. The papers are divided into the research areas on which Stephenson concentrated over the years: applied historical astronomy, Islamic and Oriental astronomy, and amateur astronomy.
In the first group of seven papers is an account by Stephenson’s longtime collaborator, Leslie Morrison, of the history of the determinations of the length of the day and how the efforts of Stephenson and his collaborators have added quantitative clarity to what was before 1970 a rather muddled mess understood only qualitatively. Other papers in this group give new results on solar eclipses from China and Rome in the late first millennium
The second group of six papers on Oriental and Islamic astronomy presents new results on records of solar and lunar eclipses and other phenomena in Georgia and Armenia during the Middle Ages; gradual acceptance of annular solar eclipses in late Medieval Islamic astronomy; detailed studies of stars, star clusters, and nebulae and the three-step magnitude system in al-Sufi’s Book of the Fixed Stars; a thorough collation of the astronomical records found in the Twenty-Five Histories of China, covering 100
The third group of four papers on amateur astronomy gives accounts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observational astronomers who were contributing amateurs or semi-professionals and is included in this volume to recognize Stephenson’s enthusiastic support for amateur astronomy over the years. One paper recounts the competition between William Herschel and the German amateur Johann Schroeter. These men corresponded with each other for about 20 years and debated the merits of their observations of the Moon, Venus, and Saturn, but their strongest contention was about the size and nature of the asteroids Ceres and Pallas, with Schroeter claiming that they were actually planets. The second paper recounts the discovery of a solar eclipse map dating to 1736 in the Warwickshire County archives that was used by one Henry Beighton, better known for his role in the Industrial Revolution, to predict the solar eclipse. The third paper surveys amateur observers in Portugal during the second half of the nineteenth century. The final paper, very long at 92 pages with some 400 references, gives two case studies of amateur astronomers in Sydney, Australia, who turned professional in 1904 and 1896, taking positions at the Sydney Observatory and the Cape Observatory in South Africa, respectively.
The editors of this book did an excellent job putting the conference proceedings together and have produced a book of uniformly high quality in both content and presentation that has no editorial blemishes that I noticed. The papers remind us all that there is always more to be learned by studying ancient or just old astronomical records.