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The Rigakubu News

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

John Flamsteed, Francis Bailey, eds.

An account of the Revd. John Flamsteed, Stellar Catalogue of the British Empire.

An account of the Revd.

the first astronomer-royal: compiled from his own manuscripts, and other authentic documents, never before published to which is added, his British catalogue of stars, corrected and enlarged by Francis Baily.

Hirokazu Yoshimura, Former Associate Professor, Department of Astronomy

John Flamsteed, edited by Francis Baily
"Flamsteed's Autobiography and Catalogue of the Stars of the British Empire"
(1835)
An account of the Revd. John Flamsteed
the first astronomer-royal: compiled from his own manuscripts, and other authentic documents, never before published to which is added, his British catalogue of stars, corrected and enlarged by Francis Baily
 
Correspondence with Isaac Newton. In which Newton tells Flamsteed to hurry up the publication of his catalog of stars.

This book was published in 1835 by order of the Naval Committee of the Privy Council of the British Empire and was given to a limited number of people. There is no record of how it came to be held in the Astronomy Department Library. It is thought that it was imported from England by a predecessor of the School during the Meiji period, when the School of Astronomy was located in Azabu and had the same library as the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory. The present work was restored by a specialist book restorer commissioned by the School of Astronomy more than 10 years ago.

From the 16th to the 19th century, the work has been used by a number of famous astronomers, from Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, to Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Edmund Halley, and Sir Thomas Harrison, and has been used by many other astronomers. The contributions of Sir Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, and others established the geocentric worldview. This book is famous as a landmark work that led to a reevaluation of the role played by John Flamsteed (1646-1719), the first Astronomer Royal of Greenwich Observatory, in this process. Francis Baily (1774-1844) discovered a large number of Flamsteed's handwritings and correspondence with various people, and carefully organized and summarized the evidence of his relationships with Newton, Halley, and others. The book is therefore very interesting to read. It is a pleasure to see that such a book is now carefully preserved as a rare book in the Science Library of The University of Tokyo. However, the handling of such rare books differs from country to country. At Harvard University in the U.S., digital images scanned by Google are made public as they are. At Cambridge University in the U.K., the University Press uses special software to process scanned images, prints them as if they were new books, and sells them at low prices. It is clear that the strategies for knowledge dissemination are different.

The book has also led to a re-evaluation of John Flamsteed's wife, Margaret Flamsteed (1670-1730), as an independent astronomer.

 

Published in the January 2020 issue of Faculty of Science News



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