Enrico Moltisanti's Web Site Il sito web di Enrico Moltisanti An Amateur Astronomer in Turin, Italy Un astrofilo a Torino Choose the language! Scegli la lingua! WHAT IS ASTRONOMY? During a clear night of 1839, in late fall, my father was returning back home, after having regulated the brick-kiln fires; I had gotten to be with him during that night walk. It was very late, the darkness total, and I was walking sleepy, stumbling over my steps. Then he took me up in his arms and, to keep me awake, began to tell me the constellations. Thus, as a 4-year-old child, I learned to recognize the Pleiades, the Little Dipper, the Big Dipper and the Milky Way, what he called the Way of St James. Just then, in a flash, a shooting star broke away; then another; then another. To my question about what they were, he replied that these things were known only by the Lord. I kept silent, and a confused feeling of huge and wonderful things took possession of me. Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli Astronomy is a very old science. Long ago the human race learned to recognize the stars and created the imaginary shapes of the constellations which they used for orientation. Our ancestors regulated their lives by seasons and discovered the cycle of the sky's many phenomena. And all this happened well before the invention of writing. To fully comprehend what Earth is, we can only try to understand what it is as compared to other worlds of the Universe: the ground beneath our feet, then, becomes the surface of an enormous sphere. This sphere revolves on itself, alternating day with night, and, over the course of a year, it also rotates around the Sun. The inclination of its axis has produced the phenomenon of the seasons. And what about stars? | |
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