Abstract
“What astronomy is expected to accomplish,” wrote the Astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy around 1840,
is at all times the same. It may lay down rules by which the movements of the celestial bodies, as they appear to us upon earth, can be computed. All else which we may learn respecting these bodies, as, for example, their appearance, and the character of their surfaces, is, indeed, not undeserving of attention, but possesses no proper astronomical interest. [1]
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Gingerich, O. (1993). The Nineteenth-Century Birth of Astrophysics. In: Linsky, J.F., Serio, S. (eds) Physics of Solar and Stellar Coronae: G.S. Vaiana Memorial Symposium. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 183. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1964-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1964-1_4
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