Giovanni Battista Hodierna
Giovanni Battista Hodierna (born April 13, 1597 in Ragusa ; † August 6, 1660 in Palma di Montechiaro ) was an Italian naturalist and priest astronomer who was also active in optics and botany . He was a student of Galileo and is considered a pioneer of the awakening natural sciences in Italy .
As a young man, he observed comets in his hometown of Ragusa in southern Sicily . He later became a priest and taught mathematics, but continued to be active in regular sky observation .
In 1654, Hodierna published the De Amirandis Coeli Characteribus nebula catalog with around 40 entries about deep sky objects he had found , which was an outstanding astronomical pioneering work for the time: nine or ten of these were previously unknown, namely Messier 6 and Messier 8 , Messier 36 , Messier 37 , Messier 38 , Messier 41 , Messier 47 , NGC 2362 , NGC 6231 , and possibly NGC 2451 . The Andromeda Galaxy he observed and the Orion Nebula had previously been described by Al-Sufi and Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc , Johann Baptist Cysat and Volpert Motzel , respectively . However, his observations and data were not known to a wide audience either, so that they went unnoticed for a long time. His work was not rediscovered until the 1980s.
Web links
- Hodierna at SEDS (English)
- Biography (italian)
- De systemate orbis cometici, deque admirandis coeli characteribus : digitized version and translation into Italian by Fredi de Maria ( memento of May 3, 2006 in the Internet Archive ), doi : 10.3931 / e-rara-444
Individual evidence
- ^ Mario Pavone: Introduzione al pensiero di Giovanni Battista Hodierna , 1981
- ↑ G. Fodera-Serio, L. Indorato, P. Nastasi: GB Hodierna's Observations of Nebulae and his Cosmology , bibcode : 1985JHA .... 16 .... 1F
- ↑ Kenneth Glyn Jones: Some Notes on Hodierna's Nebulae , 1986 bibcode : 1986JHA .... 17..187J
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hodierna, Giovanni Battista |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian astronomer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 13, 1597 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Ragusa |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 6, 1660 |
| Place of death | Palma di Montechiaro |