Charles Ives and his Road to the Stars: Notice Regarding the Two Editions (original) (raw)

Book: Behind the Stars, More Stars -Interview with Editors

Portuguese American Journal, 2019

The book Behind the Stars, More Stars: TheTagus/Disquiet Collection of New Luso-American Writing is an essential new collection of contemporary American writers of Lusophone-country descent edited by Christopher Larkosh, Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Oona Patrick of the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon.

Of Stars, and Travels (English version)

Of Stars, And Travels: An astronomic cycle in the main portal of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice* is the English version, revised and enlarged, of an article appeared in Italian in ABAV- Annuario dell'Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia 2014 (2015), pp. 235-275. Some errors have been emendated, and text and pictures have been increased. The main portal of San Marco in Venice (second half of the thirteenth century), contains an hitherto unnoticed solilunar calendar, carved into the sculptural cycle of the lower archivolt and intradox. The figures (hybrid figures, animal chases, etc.) do not have a merely decorative purpose, as believed up to now, nor they respond to a generic allegorical-moral program; rather, they represent single stars or constellations, arranged in a calculated order, as to compose a rigorous model of the celestial sphere. Stars and constellations are not always represented according to the Western Greek-Latin tradition, but with symbols that refer to a plurality of legends and cultures of the Mediterranean, the Near, and the Far East, according to the cosmopolitan vocation of this town of travellers. These visual symbols have become now totally obscure; but they were probably of common access in an epoch in which the celestial navigation was at the base of the long journeys, not only by sea, but also by land. The astronomical representations of this portal are also connected with the system, no less obscure, of the Venetian patere, the characteristic round stone ornaments on the facades of the oldest civil buildings and of some churches in town. Thanks to the contextual clarification of the symbols offered by the Marcian cycle, the patere can now be read as possible emblems of traveling merchants, placed on the facades to remember or indicate destinations and itineraries. The name of the great master who sculpted this cycle, a contemporary of Antelami and of the Master of the Ferrara Months, is not known. Who was the remarkable artist, which were the sources of his astronomical information, who were the patrons and political advisors that encoureged a so powerfully innovative work as the stone clock of St. Mark? A multidisciplinary research in depth, ranging from iconography, ancient astronomy, celestial navigation, Oriental languages ​​and cultures, will be probably be necessary to further the very complex world that St.Mark’s oldest extant portal is beginning to reveal.

A Conductor's Guide to Gabriel Jackson's To the Field of Stars

for taking the time and sharing their wisdom to bring this project to fruition. Gabriel Jackson, for sharing his beautiful work with the world and for sharing his time and energy to discuss it. Dr. Stanley Roberts, for showing me how much I want to be a low totem pole guy. Mrs. Marie Jarriel Roberts, for walking with me from where I was to where I needed to be. Dr. David Keith, for teaching me the difference between Charles and Cylvester and when to be which. Dr. Phillip Morrow, for bringing me out of the business and into the family. Mr. John Wright, for laying the foundation on which everything else has been built. My brother Jon Cheney, my best friend in life and music. My parents Lorisa and David Cheney, who have always supported me and always find a seat in the audience. My beloved wife Rebekah, for being all I have ever really needed.

Introductory Astronomy Textbooks in 19th and 20th Century America

International Astronomical Union Colloquium, 1990

A survey of 138 introductory-astronomy textbooks spanning 152 years reveals growing consensus regarding each topic’s proportion, with some clearly gaining space at the expense of others. The tables in the texts cite curious numbers, claim too many significant digits, neglect to note uncertainties, and are frequently inconsistent with, or badly behind, the research of the times. This study investigates apportionment of topics, planet and star data tables, and categorization of nebulae.To probe the student/textbook interaction, I used one copy of each of 40 recent introductory textbooks when teaching astronomy in Fall 1986. Students swapped books each session. Texts’ treatments were surveyed in daily recitation as well as term papers comparing and contrasting them on specific topics. Most books sound much more positive than current data justify. There was lots of confusing phrasing, shoddy proofreading, and careless assembly of data tables. A few books are shamefully erroneous. There ...

Brightest Stars, expanded version by Toomas Karmo

Royal Astron Soc Canada Observ Hndbk suppl, 2023

This online essay is an extended version of the essay in the printed-edition Handbook, containing all the material of its printed-edition accompaniment, but adding material of its own. The accompanying online table is likewise an extended version of the printed-edition table, (a) with extra stars (after providing for multiplicity, as we explain below, the brightest MK-classified 325, allowing for variability, where the printed edition has about 30 fewer, allowing for variability: our cutoff is mag. ~3.55), and (b) with additional remarks for most of the duplicated stars. We use a dagger superscript (†) to mark data cells for which the online table supplies some additional information, some context, or a caveat. The online essay and table try to address the needs of three kinds of serious amateur: amateurs who are also astrophysics students (whether or not enrolled formally at some campus); amateurs who, like many in the RASC, assist in public outreach, through some form of lecturing; and amateurs who are planning their own private citizen-science observing runs, in the spirit of such "pro-am" organizations as AAVSO. Additionally, we would hope that the online project will help serve a constituency of sky-lovers, whether professional or amateur, who work with the heavens in an unambitious and contemplative spirit, seeking to understand at the eyepiece, or even with the naked eye, the realities behind the little that their limited circumstances may allow them to see. (This is the same contemplative exercise as is proposed for the Cyg X-1 black hole, with its gasdumping supergiant companion HD226868, in the Handbook "Expired Stars" essay: with a small telescope, or even with binoculars, we first find HD226868, and then take a moment to ponder in awe the accompanying unobserved realities of gas-fed hot accretion disk, event horizon, and spacetime singularity.) Our online project, started as a supplement to the 2017 Handbook, must be considered still in its rather early stages. We cannot claim to have fully satisfied the needs of our various constituencies. Above all, we cannot claim to have covered all the appropriate points from stellar-astronomy news in our "Remarks" column, important though news is to amateurs of all three types. We would hope in coming years to remedy our deficiencies in several ways, most notably by relying more in our writing on recent primary-literature journal articles, with appropriate explicit citations. In our citations, we favour the now-preferred astrophysics "bibcode" formalism. The formalism is documented in simbad.u-strasbg.fr/guide/refcode/refcode-paper.html, and again in section 1.2.3 (headed "Bibliographic Identifiers") in adsabs.harvard.edu/abs_doc/help_pages/data.html. A bibcode can be transformed into the display of a more human-readable bibliography entry, often with clickable hyperlink to an underlying online full-text, all-illustrations PDF publication, in various ways. We illustrate some possibilities by taking an extreme case, namely our bibcode reference to the classic 1910 Joel Stibbins Astrophysical Journal paper that reports the electric-photometry discovery of a secondary minimum in the Algol light curve. Old though the paper is, it is nevertheless available online. The bibcode (as we state again in our "Remarks" for the Algol entry in our table) is 1910ApJ....32..185S. A browser display with hyperlink to the desired full-text, all-illustrations PDF is available from the Centre de Données Stellaires (CDS) server (probably in Strasbourg) as simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-ref?bibcode=1910ApJ....32..185S. If something has gone wrong-and experience suggests that things can go wrong, even when a bibcode appears to casual inspection to be correctly typed, at any rate in some such autonomous-agent computing environment as Microsoft Office-then one can recover through CDS as simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-fid if the star of interest and year of publication are known. In this particular case, recovery involves giving simbad.ustrasbg.fr/simbad/sim-fid some convenient identifier, for instance the IAU-promulgated name "Algol" or the Bayer identifier "beta Per." In the Algol-specific input form generated, one next asks, in the "References" section of the form, for all references from 1910 to 1910. The duly displayed bibcode, 1910ApJ....32..185S, for the sole 1910-through-1910 reference, is shown as a clickable hyperlink. Upon further clicking, the hyperlink eventually yields the PDF. A similar browser display is available from a (probably North American) ADS-NASA server as ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1910ApJ....32..