Looking Upwards...
A brief history
For as long as humans have lived on Earth, they have looked up at the stars. The passage of the stars through the night sky has guided us through the seasons, over land and sea, and now, into space itself.
The Mayans (circa 2000 BCE) constructed special buildings from which to observe the stars.
This is
the Dzibilchaltun temple
in the Yucatan, Mexico. It
is aligned so that
sunlight passes through
the building's doors
during the days of the
equinox.
The Egyptians were the first to acknowledge astronomical cycles by instituting the 365 day solar calendar in 4000 BCE. They were keen astronomers, building the pyramids with complex astronomical alignment. Chinese astronomy was also very advanced in this era, and the first comet was recorded in Chinese manuscripts in 2296 BCE. Later, around 1200 BCE, the Greeks named many of the constellations and four "wandering stars" (planets) after their gods: Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter.
In 585 BCE Thales of Miletus, a Greek astronomer, made the first prediction of a solar eclipse. Relatively soon afterwards, in 500 BCE, Pythagoras suggested that the Earth is a sphere and not flat as previously assumed, although this idea was not widely accepted. In 270 BCE Aristarchus said that the Sun is at the centre of the Solar System. This was also generally dismissed.
The Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy published his Almagest in AD 127, cataloguing 1022 stars. This was the primary astronomical text for the next 14 centuries.
Even at the time of the Renaissance, people were not ready to accept Nicolas Copernicus's theory of the Earth revolving around the Sun (1543). Books on Geography and Astronomy were destroyed in England because they were thought to contain magic. But through the life's work of Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei (left) and Johannes Kepler, the astronomical sciences grew with the invention of the telescope (Lippershey, 1608, and Galileo, 1609) and the first orbital calculations according to Kepler's laws of planetary motion (published in 1609).
With the development of calculus, the theory of gravity, and research into the nature of light, great advances were made in astronomical observation and theory. In 1796 Pierre Laplace developed the first theory of the origin of the Universe, and predicted the existence of black holes.
A century later, in 1895, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published a series of papers describing space flight. Eight years later, Orville Wright launched the first powered flight in history, flying Kitty Hawk (right) for 12 seconds. Earlier that year Tsiolkovsky made claims, accompanied by complex mathematical theories, that man would one day travel in space and occupy other planets.
All this was even before Hubble proved (in 1924) that galaxies are systems independent of the Milky Way!
The Twentieth Century saw the inventions of radio astronomy, radar and the jet engine, and satellites and space flight became a reality. The first human to orbit the Earth was Yuri Gagarin (USSR) in 1961, and Neil Armstrong (USA) was first on the moon in 1969.
Today, there is a wealth of astronomical and space science knowledge, and it forms a significant part of our daily lives - from the celebration of our birthdays once a year, to chatting to an astronaut at the International Space Station.
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Hubble directly observes Planet Orbiting Fomalhaut.
