#BlackInAstro: A Glimpse Into African Cultural Astronomy
Humans have been looking up for our entire history – today, let’s take a look at the women of indigenous African communities and their relationship to the night sky!
Humans have been looking up for our entire history – today, let’s take a look at the women of indigenous African communities and their relationship to the night sky!
This post continues our series on how western astronomy has historically interacted with Indigenous communities around the world. Today, we’re discussing Kitt Peak National Observatory and Mt. Graham International Observatory in the Southwest US.
Historic observations of sunspot variability have improved our understanding of the solar cycle tremendously, but recent reanalyses of these data has yielded a conflicted view on solar variability within the past few centuries. Today’s paper shows how we can both better visualize existing historic data and where we can go next in understanding the long-term variability of our closest star.
On 16th November in 483 CE, astronomers in China recorded the appearance of “a guest star east of Shen, as large as a peck measure, and like a fuzzy star”. The new celestial light shone brightly for just under a month, then faded to nothing. Over 1500 years later, the authors of today’s paper suggests that they may have found the source.
Today we take a look back to 1916, when distances were measured in light years and uncertainties weren’t to be included in publications. The nearly 100-year old discovery of a small star has large implications for our understanding of stellar astrophysics, even today.