HIstory of Astronomy and Neptune

Science is and has become a necessity to know just to keep up with the tremendous advancements of today and tomorrow. Basic things, such as how the universe was suspected to be started or who Ptolemy and Galileo were and what they did are just things that need to be known to fully understand what is happening in the world around you. These things are what you need to know, if you’re a scientists, to a grocery shop bagger.

Ptolemy was a Greek man who became the man to set the future for astronomy. He was the third of the Alexandrian men, this group of scientists and mathematicians taught Alexander and his generals themselves. Living around 150 A.D., and being one of the Alexandrian men, he had access to knowledge no one at the time had. From the information that he had access to, and the framework that Aristotle provided, Ptolemy was able to make a mathematical model of the universe. Certain faults and glitches in the current model grew Ptolemy confused and angry. Using his own current knowledge and applying Euclid's geometry to the universe's model he created the Ptolemaic system. In the Ptolemaic system, the model had the planets rotating around the Earth which is known as a different. Technically, in the model, the planets weren't revolving around an Earth than was centered, but more of an Earth that was off-centered, which is known as eccentric. To solve the current problem of why the planets speed up and slow down, Ptolemy insisted that the planets do not travel at a set rate, but more of a rate that changes at will. He then brought up the point that the planets do travel at an set rate, but only at the equant. The equant was a center point at which at that point, planets would seem to be traveling at an equal and uniform rate. There was still a small problem, retrograde motion. Retrograde motion is when a celestial object moves opposite to most other celestial objects around it. To explain this, he proposed that the planets move along a sub-orbit, in this case, along the deferent. His model allowed it to be agreeable to Plato's and Aristotle's models, but go into more detail of eccentric observations.

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in February 19, 1473 in Torun and was the founder of the heliocentric planetary theory. He insisted that there was a rotating Earth tha...

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...Spot after Jupiter's Great Red Spot. It is Bigger than the Earth. The winds in the storm raced at an average of 745 miles per hour. Jupiter's Great Red Spot has been going on for years, but Great Dark Spot only went on for a short period of time. Pictures from the Hubble showed it disappeared in 1994. In 1980, Saturn Jupiter and Uranus were the only planets that had rings. Because of this, the wondered if Neptune had a ring. Scientists did tests with light of other stars that Neptune passed in its orbit to find if it had rings. They found out that Neptune actually did have rings. Neptune has 8 known moons, 7 of them are small. Six of these moons were discovered one the Voyager 2 mission in 1989. Their names are Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Galatea, Larissa, and Proteus. Triton was discovered by Lassell in 1846 and is the biggest moon of Neptune. Nereid was discovered by Kuiper in 1949.

The necessity that is science is what keeps people up to date about nearly everything. Even when one doesn't think of science directly, everything new that happens is in someway related to science. Science and astronomy are two driving forces in the updates of daily life.