Category Historical photographs

Kepler was an astronomer and mathematician fascinated by Euclid's geometry. I saw in the Universe the work of a divine creator, the Perfect Geometric. In an effort to discover this geometry, he spent much of his life trying to associate the 5 Pythagorean solids with the orbits of the planets around the Sun, nesting inside each other, in what he called his "cosmic mystery", published in 1596.

Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905) was a businessman from Chicago, persuaded by George Ellery Hale to finance the construction of an observatory with the world's largest refracting telescope, with a diameter of 40 inches, which bears his name . George Ellery Hale (1868-1938) was a professor at the University of Chicago.

The first missions of the Apollo Project were successive approaches to the Moon. First an orbital flight was made, later tests were carried out on the assembly of the lunar module, taking it to the Moon on a round trip. After all these tests, the Saturn V launcher is configured.

Monte Palomar is an important American astronomical observatory, located south of the city of Los Angeles, in the state of California. It belongs to the California Institute of Technology. It was inaugurated in 1948, and has the Hale reflector telescope which, with its 5 meters in diameter, was the largest in the world for three decades, until the construction of the Russian 6-meter Zelenchukskaya telescope took place.

Radio telescopes detect electromagnetic radiation from space with wavelengths ranging from 1 mm to more than 1 km. Radio telescopes are only sensitive to electromagnetic radiation with a relatively long wavelength, so the resolution (ability to distinguish detail) of a simple instrument is low.

In the image we can see the first man who made a walk through space. This is Russian cosmonaut Alekséi Arjípovich Leónov. The photograph is not of good quality, but its spacewalk took place on March 18, 1965. Leónov was one of the twenty pilots of the Soviet Air Force who were part of the first group of cosmonauts, in 1960.

Robert H. Goddard, one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1882. At 16, Goddard read the science fiction classic "War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells, and dreamed of space flights. By 1926 he had designed, built and flown the world's first liquid fuel rocket.

A spectroscope consists of a slit, a set of lenses, a prism and an eyepiece. The light passes through a collimating lens, which produces a narrow and parallel beam of light, and then through the prism. The image of the slit is focused with the eyepiece. What you see are a series of images of the slit, known as spectral lines, each with a different color, because the prism separates the light into the colors that compose it.

The astrolabe is an astronomical instrument that is used to calculate the position of the stars. It is a circle divided into degrees with a mobile arm mounted in the center. When the zero point of the circle is oriented with the horizon, the height of any celestial object can be measured by observing the position of the arm.

Many factors (and people) are involved in the design and assembly of a telescope that will be in orbit. The work must be perfect, since repairs are very expensive and sometimes impossible. A telescope of these characteristics must contain delicate electronic instruments and, at the same time, capable of withstanding the space conditions for as long as possible.

The Terskol Peak Observatory is located in southern Russia, in the western part of the Caucasus mountain range. It is located at an altitude of 2,427 meters above sea level, on one of the summits of Mount Elbrús, and was founded in 1980. In the image you can see the white dome of the two-meter telescope.

In 1999, a surprising discovery took place in the Ziegelroda Forest, 180 kilometers southwest of Berlin, Germany. Two illegal treasure hunters who operated without a license dug up, with the help of a metal detector, two bronze swords, a chisel, several fragments of bracelets, two rifles (small axes) and a curious disk adorned with gold and other metal inlays.

The School of Athens is one of the greatest works of Renaissance painting. It is a fresco located in the Vatican Signatura, and perfectly expresses the entire genius of Rafael. The perspective is inspired by the works of Leonardo da Vinci and the characters remember Michelangelo, who at this time painted the Sistine Chapel.

Most terrestrial telescopes with lenses and mirrors are influenced by the dense and protective atmosphere that makes images blur and absorb much of the light. But this telescope has been designed to detect the end of gamma rays (photons with more than 100 billion times the energy of visible light) and in fact it needs the atmosphere to operate.

Since the origins of astronautics, animals have been used to test survival on spaceflight, a few years before attempting manned space missions. On board space vehicles, their vital signs were studied to investigate various biological processes and the possible effects of microgravity.

Pluto was discovered following a telescopic search initiated in 1905 by the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who assumed the existence of a planet located beyond Neptune as the cause of slight disturbances in the movements of Uranus. The path that led to his discovery is attributed to Percival Lowell who founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona and sponsored three separate searches of "Planet X".

The Stargazer a modified Lockheed L-1011 aircraft, furrowed the skies over the Kwajalein Atoll located in the Pacific on October 9, 2000. A small observatory satellite known as the High Energy Transient Explorer - 2 (HETE-2) was introduced in the Stargazer Pegasus winged rocket, hung under the huge fuselage of the trimotor jet.

The world's most photogenic radio telescopes row is also one of the most productive. Each of the 27 radio telescopes in the Very Large Array (VLA) is the size of a house and must be moved by means of rails. The VLA began its productive activity in May 1980. In the photograph we see him in joint formation in front of the Tres Montosas, New Mexico, USA.

Observation of the space Observatories, telescopes, detectors, ... instruments and places to study the Cosmos, to obtain images and data that allow us to better understand our Universe. Lowell Observatory Yerkes Observatory Monte Palomar Spectrograph Echelle Radio waves Large antenna Nasa Space Center Telescope in construction Gamma Telescope Very Large Array Neutrino detector Non-standard particles Brera Observatory Quito Observatory Cincinnati Observatory Terskol Observatory This gallery illustrates how, with what and from where advances in astronomy are obtained.

There are not many astronomical observatories that can boast of being built in a palace. Brera's is one of them. It is located in the palace of the same name, in the city of Milan, Italy. Share this great space with a gallery, a library and a botanical garden. The Astronomical Observatory of Brera was built in 1764 by Jesuits, but in 1773 it became dependent and managed by the Italian Government.