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Instrumentation – The Great Quadrant: Alignment

As the long term goal of my project is to collect measurements in order to produce a star catalog and determine planetary orbits, this will obviously require some way to collect these measurements.

The master instrumentationalist whose data Kepler used was Tycho Brahe. He had numerous devices and their meticulous crafting and exceptionally large sizes allowed for the most accurate measurements of the age.

But for me, one stood out: Tycho’s Great Quadrant which is the one I’ll be modeling my own after.

Tycho Brahe's Great Quadrant Continue reading “Instrumentation – The Great Quadrant: Alignment”

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Astronomia Nova – Introduction

Kepler’s introduction to Astronomia Nova is somewhat of a lengthy ramble: 20 pages skipping from topic to topic and back again. In addition, he lays out somewhat of a preview of the structure of the book itself. But since we’ll be digesting that chapter by chapter anyway, I won’t discuss most of it and will instead sift through for the important parts. In addition, my summation won’t strictly follow the format Kepler does as I will try to group ideas on a similar topic.

The first important topic Kepler hits on is the

schools of thought among astronomers, one distinguished by its chief, Ptolemy… and the other attributed to more recent proponents [Copernicus], although it is the most ancient.

Continue reading “Astronomia Nova – Introduction”

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Introduction

I first joined the SCA sometime in late 1998 or 1999. At the time, my main interest was just doing the armored combat. While I was active for a few years, college ended up taking me away. GPA before SCA as they say. After trying to do Physics education as a major, then straight Physics, I realized what I most enjoyed were my Astronomy electives and my focus began to shift towards Astrophysics.

Eventually that’s what I majored in but my skills were not sufficient for me to continue past my BS, so after graduating in 2008, I headed into the real world, still with a strong love for the field, but it turns out you can’t do too much with just a BS. So my career took a very different turn. Continue reading “Introduction”