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History of Astronomy?


Cosmo_Ken

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I am interested in the history of astronomy, most particularly how did astronomers over the last few hundred years come up with estimates of the mass of all the solar system bodies, i.e. the Earth, the moon, the Sun, the planets and their moons? And also all the distances and orbital parameters. It seems to me that they would have had to know at least some of those parameters in order to calculate the rest. I am interested in the whole process that they went through over the the last few centuries. Do you know of any books or websites about this?

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  • 3 weeks later...

Cosmo_Ken.

History is marvellous, i wish i had more time to read. I like googling, there is so much stuff out there. One thing leads to another.

NASA has lots of articles, including lots of interesting interviews (& transcripts) with old-timers giving real stories.

U might enjoy reading that science doesn't know the value of G or the masses of planets etc to much better than 1%.

But science does know the product Gm for planets to a great level of accuracy, allowing very accurate calculations (despite being in the dark about G & m individually).

And u might enjoy reading about how Newtonian gravity fails, leading to mysterious diurnal & other periodic anomalies for the Pioneer trajectory(s).

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