The Greatest 'Amateur' Astronomer You've Probably Never Heard Of

StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "From a true dark-sky site, the kind that was available to all of humanity for the first 200,000 years or so of our species' existence, the human eye can discern tens of thousands of stars, detailed features of the Milky Way and a handful of deep-sky nebulae. With the advent of the telescope, our reach into the Universe was greatly enhanced, as the increase in light-gathering power opened up orders of magnitude more stars and nebulae, and even allowed us to see a spiral structure to some nebulae beginning in the 1840s. But in all the time since then, the largest telescope ever developed is not even six times bigger than the largest from nearly 200 years ago. Yet the details we can observe in the Universe today aren't limited by what our eyes can perceive looking through our telescopes at all. The combination of astronomy and photography has changed our understanding of the Universe forever, and we owe the greatest advances to an 'amateur' you've probably never heard of: Isaac Roberts."

tl;dr: developed piggyback astronomy

[QuasiSteve]

his greatest contribution is a legacy that lasts to this day: he developed the technique of piggyback astronomy.

piggyback astronomy tl;dr: put camera on equatorial mount telescope (disregard the telescope part) so you can do long exposures without (most of) the motion blur.

Not the best article for Isaac Roberts...

[Ecuador]

Maybe it is just me, but why does the article look like it is written for 8-year olds? From the layout to the writing and includes errors that show the writer is not really an amateur astronomer. For example they used an image to show "piggyback" mount. Well, they took an image from a webpage that is titled Questar telescope piggyback mount, only from that article they took the image WITHOUT the piggyback mount! There are better articles about Isaac Roberts, the ones I had read were better. But of course it wouldn't be /. tradition if the summary linked the best ones!

Re:I knew him.

[The Grim Reefer]

We just called him Zak. Good guy.

Just how old are you? He died in 1904.

Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

> the human eye can discern tens of thousands of stars

"This is a common misconception. There are about 6000 stars in the sky
visible to the unaided eye ... you cannot see all 6000 stars at the same
time. The Earth itself blocks half the sky, so you can only see at most
half the stars in the sky at any one time."
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/badstarlight.html

"The Yale Bright Star Catalog catalogs the "naked eye visible stars",
which they consider to be those with a magnitude of 6.5 or brighter.
Those have been catalogued and listed, and there are 9110 entries
in that list"
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/742414.html

Re:Here, here! (or is it hear, hear?)

[Slartibartfast]

It's "Hear, hear!" I'd wondered about that for some years until I'd read in some book someone saying, "Oyez, oyez!" Not sure where that derived from, but it's close enough to Spanish's "Oye, oye" (Literally: (you) hear) that its origin became clear. And, oh, hey -- here's Wikipedia to give me more info than I ever knew existed on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... [wikipedia.org]