AAS 199th meeting, Washington, DC, January 2002
Session 1. HAD I: New Views of Historical Research in the 21st Century
Special Session Oral, Sunday, January 6, 2002, 2:00-4:00pm, Caucus

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[1.01] Heralds of Astronomy: Landmark Works in the History of Astronomy.

R. Brashear (Smithsonian Inst.)

In 1955, the famous science book collector Bern Dibner published his classic work, Heralds of Science, a description of two hundred books from his collection that marked great moments in the development of the sciences and technology. He included seventeen astronomy titles, from early works such as Regiomontanus's Epitome of Ptolemy (1496), Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), and Kepler's Astronomia Nova (1609), up to Herschel's "Account of a Comet" (1782), Laplace's Treatise on Celestial Mechanics (1798-1825), and Adams's paper leading to the discovery of Neptune (1846). This talk will take a closer look at the works and their authors, as well as their relevance for historical research in the future. Given time, there will be some discussion on the possibility of collecting these works for your own library, and why many other works were not on Dibner's list.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: brashearr@sil.si.edu

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