Download PDF - Carl Zeiss

18
More recent history
of astronomy
In 1661, Scottish mathematician
James Gregory (1638-1675) developed
the reflector telescope which
bears his name. In 1671, Giovanni
Domenico Cassini (1625-1712) used
measurements on a pendulum to determine
the compression of the
earth. Using an air telescope with a
length of 11-14 meters, he discovered
four moons around Saturn and
the gap in the rings of Saturn named
after him. The famous observatory in
Greenwich, England, was founded
in 1675. Christiaan Huygens (1629-
1695) built an air telescope with a
focal length of 3.3 meters and used
it to discover the true shape of
Saturn and its rings in 1684. He also
discovered Saturn’s moon, Titan. Sir
Isaac Newton’s (1643-1727) main
treatise “Philosophiae naturalis principia
mathematica”, which included
the law of gravity, was published in
1687. With the support of electress
Sophie Charlotte, Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz (1646-1716) founded the
observatory in Berlin in 1700. Approximately
half a century later,
William Herschel (1738-1822) built
the largest telescopes of his time
and became known mainly for discovering
Uranus in 1781. He was one
of the first astronomers to attempt to
elucidate the structure of Milky Way.
Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)
published his classical method for
calculating the orbits of planets in
his treatise “Theoria motus corporum
coelestium” in 1809. The first photographic
images of stars were made
in 1857. Maximilian Franz Joseph
Cornelius Wolf (1863-1932), an astronomer
from Heidelberg, Germany
took the first photographic images of
the sky for celestial charts. In 1890,
US physicist Albert Abraham Michelson
(1852-1931) used an interferometer
on Mount Wilson to measure
the distances between very closely
spaced double stars and the diameters
of bright stars. In 1903, Carl
Pulfrich (1858-1927) of Carl Zeiss in
Jena, Germany, invented the stereoscopy-based
stereocomparator or
blink comparator that allowed him to
discern moving stars in photographic
images of the sky. US astronomer Edwin
Hubble (1889-1953) determined
the distance between two nearby
spiral nebulae in 1923. His insights
contributed to the notion that spiral
nebulae are independent stellar systems.
The spatial distribution of other
galaxies and the detectable red shift
in their spectra were the basis of
Hubble’s most well-known contribution
to astronomy: he discovered that
the universe is expanding.
Since 1990, the space telescope
bearing his name has recorded the
finest details of the planets and
stellar systems without interference
by the earth’s atmosphere.
Innovation 16, Carl Zeiss AG, 2005