Meteors
The Leonids and the Memory of 1833
Cosmo Tate looks back at the great Leonid storms of 1833, 1866, and 1966, and forward to the comparatively quiet shower today's amateur observers will encounter in November.
Tag
history of astronomy
Catalogues
A Nineteenth-Century Observing Notebook, Examined
Caroline Furness kept her observing logs at Vassar's small dome between 1894 and 1936. The notebooks survive, and their calligraphy is a small lesson in what scientific record-keeping used to be.
Catalogues
The New General Catalogue as a Nineteenth-Century Achievement
John Louis Emil Dreyer compiled the NGC in 1888 from observations by three generations of the Herschel family and a small army of correspondents. What he left behind still anchors the field.