From OCCHIALE to Printed Page: The Making of Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius

Opere: Le Opere di Galileo Galilei. Edizione Nazionale. Edited by Antonio Favaro (20 vols, Florence, 1890–1909; reprinted 1929–39 and 1964–66).

Galileo Belisario Vinta , 19 March 1610, Opere , x, 300.

Stillman Drake , “Galileo's first telescopic observations”, Journal for the history of astronomy , vii (1976), 153–68, espec. pp. 158–9.

Galileo to ?, 7 January 1610, Opere , x, 273–8, p. 277. Favaro thought the letter was addressed to Antoniode Medici Stillman Drake thinks it is more probable that the addressee was Enea Piccolimini ( Galileo at work (Chicago, 1978), 143–4). Drake has translated the entire letter in the article cited in ref. 2.

Drake , Galileo at work , 148–52.

Galileo Galilei , Sidereus nuncius or the Sidereal messenger , translated by Van Albert Helden (Chicago, 1989), 67.

Magini G. A. , Ephemerides coelestium motuum (Venice, 1582), f. 444v. Note that for his horoscope of de Cosimo Medici II , prepared at about the same time, Galileo also used these Ephemerides (see Owen Gingerich , Journal for the history of astronomy , xxi (1990), 369).

Currently, there are several computer programs that will give the formation of Jupiter's Galilean satellites for any given date; we have used Barbara Becker's results from the Redshift program. Earlier, the calculations for the first week of Galileo's observations were made by Jean Meeus , “Galileo's first records of Jupiter's satellites”, Sky and telescope , xxiv (1963), 137–9.

Stillman Drake , “Galileo gleanings XIII”, Physis , iv (1962), 342–4: “… decision to publish … made precisely at that time.”.

Galileo Belisario Vinta , 30 January 1610, Opere , x, 280–1.

Galileo's continuing desire to maintain a monopoly on astronomical discoveries is chronicled in Mario Biagioli , “Replication or monopoly? The economics of invention and discovery in Galileo's observations of 1610”, Science in context , xiii (2000), 547–93; reprinted in Galileo in context , edited by Jürgen Renn (Cambridge, 2001), 277–320.

Ibid. , 280.

Galileo Belisario Vinta , 14 February 1610, ibid. , 283.

Marc Welser Christopher Clavius , 12 March 1610, ibid. , 288.

Opere , iii, 432–3.

Ibid. , 49. See also 50.

Elizabeth Cavicchi , “Painting the Moon”, Sky and telescope , lxxxii (1991), 313–15.

Guglielmo Righini , “New light on Galileo's lunar observations”, in Reason, experiment, and mysticism in the Scientific Revolution , edited by Righini Maria Luisa Bonelli William R. Shea (New York, 1975), 59–76. See also Guglielmo Righini , Contributo alla interpretazione scientifica dell'opera astronomica di Galileo (Monografia, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence, 1978, no. 2).

Owen Gingerich , “Dissertatio cum Professore Righini et Sidereo Nuncio”, in Righini Bonelli Shea (eds), op. cit. (ref. 17), 77–88.

Drake , op. cit. (ref. 2).

Ewen A. Whitaker , “Galileo's lunar observations and the dating of the composition of ‘Sidereus Nuncius’”, Journal for the history of astronomy , ix (1978), 155–69.

Zdeněk Kopal , The Moon (Dordrecht, 1969), 225; Kopal Robert W. Carder , Mapping of the Moon, past and present (Dordrecht, 1974), 4.

Johannes Hevelius , Selenographia sive Lunae descriptio (Gdansk, 1647), 205.

Galileo's telescopes had a field of view of about one-quarter of a degree and could therefore show only one-quarter of the lunar surface in one view. This was a handicap in efforts to map the Moon and it goes some way toward explaining inaccuracies, including those of Hevelius himself, before about 1650, when the astronomical telescope with its much larger field of view replaced the Galilean telescope in astronomical research.

Samuel Y. Edgerton , “Galileo, Florentine ‘Disegno’ and the ‘Strange Spottednesse’ of the Moon”, Art journal , xliv (1984), 225–32. See also van Albert Helden Mary G. Winkler , “Representing the heavens: Galileo and visual astronomy”, Isis , lxxxiii (1992), 195–217, and “Johannes Hevelius and the visual language of astronomy”, in Renaissance and revolution: Humanists, scholars, craftsmen, and natural philosophers in early modern Europe , ed. by Field J. V. Frank A. J. L. James (Cambridge, 1994), 97–116.

Ibid.; Terrie Bloom , “Borrowed perceptions: Harriot's maps of the Moon”, Journal for the history of astronomy , ix (1978), 117–22.

Mario Biagioli , Galileo courtier: The practice of science in the culture of absolutism (Chicago, 1993), passim.

Galileo , op. cit. (ref. 1).

Whitaker , op. cit. (ref. 20), 155.

Ibid. , 158.

See Mario Biagioli , “Picturing objects in the making: Scheiner, Galileo and the discovery of sunspots”, Ideals and cultures of knowledge in early modern Europe , ed. by Wolfgang Detel Claus Zittel (Berlin, 2002), 39–96.

Galileo Galilei , Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti (1613), Opere , v, 71–249, esp. p. 102.

The patchwork of insertions can be unpacked by following Galileo's system of special symbols in the manuscript printed in Opere , iii, 17–47.

HD 32811 = SAO 76962 = Hip 23784.

The horoscope was first dated by Gingerich , op. cit. (ref. 18), 88, and subsequently Guglielmo Righini pointed out that the date matched Cosimo's Birthday , “L'Oroscopo Galileiano di Cosimo de' Medici”, Annali dell'Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze , i (1976), 29–36.