Abstract
After the creation by King Louis XIV (the ‘Sun King’) of the Royal Academy of Sciences (1666) and of the Paris Observatory (1667), astronomers had quadrants equipped with micrometers which they could use to obtain positions and diameters of celestial objects. They also could observe the physical aspects of these objects with long-focus refractors. One of their favourite targets was the Sun, and they were particularly interested in its position, as well as its diameter, sunspots and eclipses. Richard Stephenson has successfully employed old solar eclipses records, mainly from Chinese chronicles, to study long-term variations in the rotation rate of the Earth.
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Notes
- 1.
In 1982 a colloquium was organised in Paris to mark the tercentennial of the death of Picard. Among the papers presented was one about Picard as an astronomical observer (Grillot 1987) and another that utilised his measurements of the diameter of the Sun over a 6-year period to gauge the quality of his astronomical observations (Débarbat 1987). Subsequently, Toulmonde (1995) included a critical review of Débarbat’s findings in a thesis he wrote on measurements of the solar diameter.
- 2.
When Cassini moved from Italy to France, he also changed his name from Giovanni Domenico Cassini to Jean Dominique Cassini, and I have opted to use the latter version in this paper.
- 3.
Twenty-five years later a substantially-revised and expanded version of this book was published, authored on this occasion by Richard Stephenson and David A. Green (2002).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Mrs Greffe, Curator of the Academy of Science, for allowing the publication of Fig. 2. I also wish to thank Professor Wayne Orchiston (National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand) for helping with the translation of this paper from French into English, and then with its subsequent revision.
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Débarbat, S. (2015). Homage to Richard Stephenson: French Observations of the Sun at the Time of the ‘Sun King’. In: Orchiston, W., Green, D., Strom, R. (eds) New Insights From Recent Studies in Historical Astronomy: Following in the Footsteps of F. Richard Stephenson. Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07614-0_5
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