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July 13, 2009
Script #9
[A version of this script was broadcast Saturday, on Public Radio's StarDate, and now appears as an audio file at WWW.StarDate.org. - TH]
During the first part of the twentieth century, looking at our own Solar System no longer was thought to be “cool” among professional astronomers. With new, large telescopes, they were busy studying much-more-distant and faint stars and galaxies. Greek astronomer J. H. Focas was certainly not “cool.” With his small telescope at the Athens Observatory, he was limited to observing the bright, nearby planets. What is more, he did so visually and wrote down what he saw. By then, most astronomers already had given up looking through their instruments at all! Photography and electrical devices were considered more sensitive and more accurate than the human eye.
However, by the middle of the century, the new technology of rocketry promised the possibility of not merely peering at the planets, but actually visiting them! To prepare the way, these worlds needed to be examined from the Earth anew. The Solar System once again was fashionable. But who was an expert in this (until recently) antiquated field of astronomy? Still toiling in obscurity, J. H. Focas knew planets. In the 1960s, when NASA needed help getting ready to send space probes to Mars, it was he to whom they turned. In appreciation, craters on both the Moon and Mars are named for him.
In the words of a French colleague, “Focas without a telescope would have been like Chopin without a piano.” This July we celebrate the one-hundredth birthday of the last of the great visual observers.
Posted by hockey at July 13, 2009 9:50 AM