Humankind's Greatest Steps: Thrilling History of the Lunar Astronomy and the Fifty Years of the Arrival of Man to the Moon. 2ª Edt. by García S. Dubán H

Author:García S., Dubán H. [García S., Dubán H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Image 6.2

Lunar Elliptical Orbit

Johannes Kepler extended his Laws of Planetary Motion to explain the kinematics of natural satellites around their respective planets.

Also in the Epitome this astronomer argued on the theory of eclipses and explained why the Moon seems to be illuminated by a weak reddish light during total eclipses: he rightly supposed that sunlight, when crossing through the terrestrial atmosphere, it deviates from its path to reach the satellite and then to be reflected. Likewise, Kepler dealt with the total eclipses of the Sun, he trated with the luminous brightness that appears around the King star’s globe during these phenomena and cited what was previously stated by Plutarch: “ The Moon sometimes obscures the Sun completely, but always for a short time, and it is never large enough to prevent a certain luminosity from appearing around the circumference of the Sun, which makes the darkness never black and deep nor completely dark .” 4 What is constituted in the first historically recorded considerations on the solar corona.

Other Keplerian Works

Although they were contemporaries, Kepler and Galileo never met personally; but each was well informed about the other’s works and they often written themselves. On April 8, 1610, Kepler finally got the edition of Galileo’s little book, Sidereus Nuncius , or Sidereal Messenger, which was sent to him by the own author. In some forty pages Galileo gives a very precise description of his telescopic observations and states that he has seen amazing things in the sky, so he asks the German astronomer for his interpretations. Kepler responded publicly in 1610 with a booklet called Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo , or Dissertation about the Sidereal Messenger , praising him for his constructed telescopes and for the discoveries made with them, as well as adding own interpretations and hypotheses, all within the framework of the Heliocentric theory.

For great disappointment of the German astronomer, the hypothesis of fixing the orbits of the planets inside perfect polyhedrons, or Platonic Solids, as he had done in his first work Cosmographic Mystery, never worked. Harmonices Mundi, or The Harmony of the World of 1619, is a book written by Kepler where he began exposing this theory, to finally show that it is incompatible with the astronomical observations and with the two laws of planetary movement exposed by him in his New Astronomy , so he ended rejecting it . The third law, which indicates that the cube of the average distance from the planet to the Sun is proportional to the square of its orbital period, is newly presented in chapter 5 of The Harmony of the Worlds . Additionally, in this work Kepler tried to justify the planetary movements from the causal point of view, postulating a force similar to magnetism which he thought emanated from the Sun.

The Rudolphine tables are planetary and stellar datasets collected by Kepler from the astronomical observations made by Tycho Brahe; they are presented in tabular form and were widely used by astronomers around the world for more than a century to determine celestial movements and so to calculate the positions of planets and stars.

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