Treccani History of Science
The Nineteenth Century
H2 – Astronomy
Edited by Curtis Wilson
The professionalisation of astronomy
• 1. Pre-1800.
• 2. Astronomy and its personnel after 1800
• 3. Observatories.
• 4. Astrometry and new sciences.
• 5. Astronomy and the State.
• 6. Professional instrument makers.
• 7. Salaried academic astronomers.
• 8. Professional assistants.
Large telescopes in the nineteenth century
• 1. Development and applications of refractors and reflectors.
• 2. The advent of photography and spectroscopy.
• 3. Late nineteenth-century innovations.
The positional astronomy from Bessel to Auwers
• 1. The transit instrument and the meridian circle
• 2. The star catalogs
• 3. The parallax of fixed stars
The discovery of Neptune and the perihelion advance of Mercury
• 1. Uranus’ motion.
• 2. Adams and Le Verrier.
• 3. Searches.
• 4. The discovery.
• 5. A happy accident?
• 6. The perihelion advance of Mercury.
Celestial mechanics after Laplace: Hamilton-Jacobi theory
• 1. The Lagrange-Poisson theory of perturbations
• 2. Hamilton.
• 3. Jacobi
• 4. Lunar theory.
• 5. Tisserand.
• 6. Poincaré.
The Lunar theory from da Laplace to Hansen and Hill
• 1. The Lunar theory of Laplace.
• 2. Damoiseau, Plana and Pontécoulant.
• 3. Hansen.
• 4. Delaunay.
• 5. The controversy over the secular acceleration of the Moon’s mean motion.
• 6. Hill’s Lunar theory.
The three body problem and the stability of the solar system
• 1. Historical development.
• 2. The work of Poincaré.
• 3. Regularisation in the three-body problem.
• 4. General stability theory.
• 5. Numerical investigations.
• 6. Later developments.
Spectroscopy and the rest of astrophysics
• 1. Astronomy in the early nineteenth century.
• 2. The dispersion of light.
• 3. The advent of spectroscopy