MDMD(1): Notes

[Matthew P Wiener]

Jody asks:

>Do you, or does anyone else know, the capabilities of astronomical science
>at the time (1786)? I'm especially curious about the ..."the Times are as
>impossible to calculate, this Advent, as the Distance to a Star." line from
>page six.

Your question is rather broad, so I'll stick to the specific subquestion.

The first successful parallax measurements of a star other than our sun were
made in the early 19th century.  The effort to do so had been going on since
at least Galileo's day.  Bradley was using a zenith sector back in 1729 to
measure parallax.  He at first thought he had succeeded, but when he noticed
that all the stars he checked had the identical parallax, he was suspicious,
and concluded that it was something else, to wit, aberration.
--
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba at sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)    If Apple owned
 NBC, they would sue Nike for comedy-interface copyright violation.