Stories from the stores

Category: Astronomy

How to clear your calendar (the extreme way).

February 28th, 2012 | by | astronomy, meta, time

Feb
28

The 29th of February, a Leap day, is coming up again. On this mysterious date 20- year- olds celebrate their fifth birthdays and so on. What has this got to do with this beautiful armilliary sphere , on display in The Science Museum, London?

 

Armiliary sphere by Sisson (credit: Science Museum)

The sphere was made in 1731 for Prince Frederick , son of George II,  who died before his father, hence he never came to the throne. Both he and Princess Augusta, were interested in what we would now call science. They commissioned this instrument, which shows the planets circling the Sun, from Jonathan Sisson, a leading London instrument maker. The ‘horizon ring’, the horizontal ring  round the instrument, is engraved with the days of the year and the signs of the zodiac.

However, the first day of spring, or first point of Aries, is not marked as the 21st of March but the 10th. The  equinoxes, when the days are the same length as the nights, had been moving backwards ever since Julius Caesar set the calendar in 46BC. This was because the 29th of February, coming every 4 years, was too frequent. In 1752 , in the reign of George II, the UK moved to the new calendar, when the 29th Feb was not quite every four years. In a stroke we lost 11 days-the 3rd to the 13th of September.  The painting by Hogarth ”An Election Entertainment’ has suggested there may have been riots over this loss, but there is no evidence.

 In some ways the UK was a conservative country and we were slow to make the change to the new calendar. In the 21st century precision timing rules our seasons.

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A star-crossed birthday for Dickens

February 7th, 2012 | by | astronomy, quirky

Feb
07

Today, people around the world are celebrating Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday. Hopefully they’ll enjoy themselves more than Dickens himself did on a youthful birthday outing:

‘Slow torture’ … ‘it was awful’ … ‘very alarming’ … ‘I thought if this were a birthday it were better never to have been born’.

Is Dickens recalling that terrible birthday? (National Media Museum)

Dickens looked back on this beleaguered birthday in an All the Year Round article of 1863. The subject of his ire was an astronomical lecture, a popular entertainment of the time. The young Dickens was unimpressed with the ageing and shabby demonstration instrument, ‘at least one thousand stars and twenty five comets behind the age’, with poor likenesses of the celestial bodies and malfunctioning light effects. The lecturer also droned on, tapping away at the model ‘like a wearisome woodpecker’.

Dickens might have had better luck with Mr Bartley’s lectures. Bartley was a comedian for most of the year, but turned his talents to astronomy when the comedy shows stopped for Lent.

Would Mr Bartley have entertained Dickens? (Science Museum)

19th century astronomical shows were often spectacular theatrical events – perhaps why Dickens was so disappointed with the shabby and outdated performance he encountered. Lecturers travelled the country, advertising their wares with increasingly outlandish names for their demonstration instruments.  Audiences might encounter the Eidouranion in Rochester, or be dazzled by the Dioastrodoxon in Wakefield.

You can find out more about scientific showbiz in Richard Altick’s The Shows of London, or Iwan Rhys Morus’s When Physics Became King. Or why not sample the Science Museum’s present-day versions? I wonder what Dickens would have made of them…

 
 

 

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Our stormy Sun

August 24th, 2011 | by | astronomy, communication

Aug
24

Astronomers have announced that they can now track sunspots forming before the tell-tale dark spots reach the Sun’s surface.

The spots are caused by magnetic activity inside the Sun, and are associated with solar storms, massive bursts of material coming from our star. NASA recently released these staggering observations of our little blue planet being swamped by a sunstorm.

Better prediction of solar storms is vital to protect our communication, navigation and power systems. In 1859 the biggest solar storm on record zapped telegraph systems around the world, with some equipment even bursting into flames. Magnetic compasses went haywire. Aurorae lit up the sky. In today’s wired world, a big storm could be catastrophic.

In 1859, Richard Carrington observed a large group of sunspots, and two solar flares. The flares' path is marked A-C and B-D. This was one of the first observations of solar flares, which Carrington suspected were the cause of the disruption on Earth. (Science Museum)

Accurate space weather predictions would allow authorities to prevent the worst effects of a solar storm by taking satellites offline and shielding power grids. With changes in the Sun’s cycles of sunspot activity, this could become increasingly important over the next few decades.

Today’s solar weather forecasters are the latest in a long tradition of sunspot-spotters. Here are a few illustrations from our collections.

A 1612 illustration of Galileo's observations of sunspots. Galileo was one of several astronomers who independently observed sunspots with a telescope in 1610 (Science Museum).

James Nasmyth's painting of a sunspot, 1860, reveals the extraordinary detail visible through his 20-inch reflecting telescope (Science Museum).

This X-ray map of the Sun's active regions was based on photographs taken from the Skylab space station in 1975 (NASA / Science & Society).

While solar weather can be troublesome, here’s hoping for sunny weather of a different sort for the last few weeks of school holidays. Once again, the Great British Summer has been a bit of a damp squib. Some things never change…

Braving the chill on Brighton Beach in 1966 (NMeM / Tony Ray-Jones).

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Einstein was right!

May 5th, 2011 | by | astronomy, current science, exhibitions, physics

May
05

We sometimes find that objects in our collections suddenly become newsworthy because of events beyond the Museum. This beautiful, but small and unassuming, object on display in Cosmos & Culture is now one of them.

Small, but perfectly formed (Science Museum)

It’s a prototype gyroscope from the Gravity Probe B experiment, which has been testing predictions made by Einstein’s general theory of relativity: that a massive body such as the Earth should warp and twist the space-time around it.

Four spheres like this one – among the most perfect ever made – were set spinning on a spacecraft precisely pointed towards a guide star. Scientists spent several years ploughing through data to see if the angle of the spheres’ spin was altered by the warp and twist, and yesterday NASA announced the results. They’re just as Einstein predicted.

We acquired the gyroscope back in 2005, while the spacecraft was busy gathering data, and I was lucky enough to meet chief scientist Francis Everitt.

At the time he was non-commital about what the experiment might reveal: ‘There’s many reasons for thinking that as magnificent as the advance General Relativity gives, it’s not quite the final answer. Whether, for example, in our experiment or not one will find anything different from Einstein, I’ve no wish to make any prediction about. Our job is to do the experiment. But physics advances, science advances, by measuring things’.

The results are a huge vindication for the Gravity Probe B project - it was in the planning for over 40 years and the mission faced cancellation several times. But, as Everitt says, we still may not have the final answer.

General relativity is so complex that there are many other predictions of the theory which are yet to be confirmed, and other scientists are busy making their own measurements. Some of the experiments haven’t even started yet. This is a prototype part for Advanced LIGO, a ground-based experiment due to be completed in 2015.

Will Advanced LIGO also prove Einstein right? (Science Museum)

Here‘s how it works … and here‘s how we put it together for exhibition display (cue lots of head-scratching from our Workshops team). Some time after 2015, might this object also be hitting the headlines?

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Great Men and gruesome mementos

October 19th, 2010 | by | astronomy, exhibitions, physics, quirky

Oct
19

A few weeks ago, Stewart talked about relics in our collections – often mundane objects that have gained mystique through association with famous historical characters. Recently, I got a close-up look at what’s possibly the ultimate scientific museum relic: Galileo’s body parts.

The middle finger of Galileo’s right hand has been on display at Florence’s history of science museum for many years. The museum’s recently been refurbished and (in what’s possibly a cunning marketing tool to entice visitors from the Uffizi around the corner) renamed the Museo Galileo. A gallery which contains the only surviving instruments made by Galileo himself has the finger in pride of place – and also another finger, thumb and tooth that were recently found.

Galileo's fingers on display (Alison Boyle).

The display stands, made in the 18th and 19th centuries, reinforce the idea of saintly reliquaries. It’s questionable whether these remains can tell us much about Galileo and his work – certainly less than studying the instruments he made, or his books and papers in the Museo’s archives. But during my visit they were by far the most popular objects in the gallery.

There’s an enduring fascination with the relics of ‘Great Men’.

Several apple trees around the country are claimed to be descended from Newton’s inspiration for the laws of gravitation, despite the story being almost certainly apocryphal: he only related the tale of watching an apple drop a few years before his death (possibly with a view to furthering his posthumous fame) and the story only gained wider currency centuries later.

It’s now unstoppable – a fragment of ‘that tree’ has even been taken into space. But if you prefer something a bit closer to the man himself, a number of Newton’s death masks survive.

An engraving based on Newton's death mask (Science Museum).

Almost anything associated with Einstein is highly collectible – his brain, removed during autopsy, had its own adventure, including a road trip across the US in the boot of a rental car. You can read more about the strange story of Einstein’s brain on our Ingenious website, or in Carolyn Abrahams’ book Possessing Genius.

We seem to crave such relics of genius – and the more gruesome the better.

Could studying Einstein's brain ever reveal his reasoning? (Associated Press / Science & Society)

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