Figure 1: Page from the original printing of Sidereus Nunicius showing Galileo’s sketches of the Medicean Moons
In many of our astronomy classes, we discuss the importance of Galileo’s first telescopic observations in eventually overthrowing the Ptolemaic geocentric system. His first observations were relayed to the public in his short book Sidereus Nuncius, which is Latin for The Starry Messenger (or arguably, The Starry Message). In it he relates his observations of the Moon, the myriad of new stars he observed (with sketches of the Pleiades and Praesepe regions), and the Moons of Jupiter.
He originally called these the Medicean Stars, a call out to his potential benefactors, the four Medici brothers (the book itself was dedicated to one of them who had been a former pupil). Seeking for funds for your science… things really haven’t changed very much in 400 years…
With Starry Night, SciDome can easily reproduce the date and situations of Galileo’s observations. Others have done this in the past, and I refer you to the excellent article by Enrico Bernieri called “Learning from Galileo’s Errors” published in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 122, 3 (2012) which goes through his observations in detail and discusses the errors which Galileo made.
Another excellent article is by Michael Mendillo in the Proceedings of the IAU Symposium No. 269 (2010) called “The Appearance of the Medicean Moons in 17th Century Charts and Books – How Long Did It Take?” which gives rich background on some of the aftermath of Galileo’s revelations.
I also highly recommend the Wikipedia article on Sidereus Nuncius as an excellent starting point in building your background information on Galileo’s first telescopic observations. In addition, Ernie Wright has graphically reproduced Galileo’s observations and placed them online in an excellent web presentation.
With the incredible talent of Steve Sanders (Eastern University Observatory Administrator), I have created a minilesson for Volume 3 of the Fulldome Curriculum which reproduces all of Galileo’s published observations of the Medicean moons.
Figure 2: SciDome presentation of Galileo’s first Jupiter observations from January 7, 1610 from Padua, Italy.
Using Padua, Italy as our observation location and the approximate times given for each observation in Sidereus Nuncius, we begin with the close-up view of Jupiter on the dome as seen on January 7, 1610 at approximately 6 PM local time. Next we place a slide of the view as drawn by Galileo in Sidereus Nuncius below the view to show just how accurate Galileo was in his sketches. The labels of the Galilean moons are then displayed.
Note that although all four moons presented themselves, Io and Europa were too close together to be resolved by Galileo’s homemade 20X telescope which suffered also from chromatic and spherical aberration. This is an important fact to remember, because essentially all of the “errors” which we will find in comparing his sketches to the actual viewing circumstances were because of his lack of resolution.
We proceed by advancing time in Starry Night so that the audience can watch the dance of the moons around Jupiter and stop at the next observations of Jupiter as recorded by Galileo, on January 8, 1610. Then his sketch of this configuration is displayed, and again we note the accuracy of his rough sketches.
The minilesson continues in this fashion, showing the moons moving from date to date and then presenting 21 successive sketches by Galileo as presented in Sidereus Nuncius. Galileo concluded after four nights of observations that these tiny “stars” were indeed most likely satellites of Jupiter, which was of momentous importance because it was the first time that moons had been discovered around another body.
It also indicated that a planet could move and moons “stay up with it” despite its motion, an Aristotelian argument once offered to discount that the Earth could be moving because, if it did, how could the Moon know enough to keep up with it? Obviously Jupiter had at least four moons and they had no problem staying with it!
I have found that going through many of these configurations with my students greatly enhances their appreciation of Galileo and the great discoveries that he made despite the limitations of his equipment. Presenting this minilesson engages students in the realization that Galileo was both an excellent and honest observer as well as a genius. His observations helped to lead to the downfall of the geocentric universe and the eventual acceptance of the heliocentric model