Famous Astronomers On This Day Astronomy is the oldest of the natural sciences, dating back to antiquity, with its origins in the religious, mythological, cosmological, calendrical, and astrological beliefs and practices of prehistory: vestiges of these are still found in astrology, a discipline long interwoven with public and governmental astronomy. And yet, this began to change in the early days of civilization. people in the land of babylonia (iraq and syria in modern times) created a large city on the banks of the euphrates river. from roughly 2300 to 1879 bc, babylonia grew from a small town to a large city and at last became the capital of an empire.
The First Astronomers A B C Maps The european astronomers drew first on greek astronomy, as translated from arabic, before acquiring direct access to the classics of greek science. thus, modern astronomy is part of a continuous tradition, now almost 4,000 years long, that cuts across multiple cultures and languages. this article focuses on this central story line. Prehistoric astronomy . fast forward about 10,000 years to the time of the first civilizations, and the earliest astronomers who already figured out how to use the sky. in some cultures, they were priests, priestesses, and other "elites" who studied the movement of celestial bodies to determine rituals, celebrations, and planting cycles. This was important for astronomers calculating the movement of heavenly bodies. huygens was the first to observe the rings of saturn around 1658 and to clearly observe titan, one of the planet's moons. huygens made a massive aerial telescope in 1686, the world's biggest. Persian astronomer abd al rahman al sufi (903–986), known as azophi to westerners, made the first known observation of a group of stars outside of the milky way, the andromeda galaxy. nicolaus.
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