The traditional Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar which identifies years, months, and days according to astronomical phenomena. A more purely lunar calendar was also known in China, however this was not widely accepted by farmers who tended to focus on seasons and predictability thereof. The traditional Chinese calendar is also focuses on the solar cycle to produce a useful agricultural calendar. The Chinese lunisolar calendar has had several significant variations over the course of time and history, and despite the name also considers various other astronomical phenomena besides the cycles of the sun and the moon, such as the planets and the constellations of asterisms along the ecliptic. The logic of the various permutations of the calendar has been based in considerations such as the technical from mathematics and astronomy, the philosophical considerations, and the political. The influence of the Gregorian calendar evidences itself in modern times, and the disparities between different lunisolar calendars and others is notable. Typical features of the calendars include cyclical considerations, such as the ganzhi system or repeating cycles of months or solar terms. One calendrical consideration may be the consecutive numbering of years from a chosen starting year, such as the inauguration of Huangdi or the birth of Confucious. Also, many dynasties had their own dating systems.
Hipparchus was a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician. He is considered the founder of trigonometry, but is most famous for his incidental discovery of the precession of the equinoxes. Hipparchus was born in Nicaea, Bithynia, and probably died on the island of Rhodes, Greece. He is known to have been a working astronomer between 162 and 127 BC.
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. It was not completely separated in Europe during the Copernican Revolution starting in 1543. In some cultures, astronomical data was used for astrological prognostication.
Sunspots are phenomena on the Sun's photosphere that appear as temporary spots that are darker than the surrounding areas. They are regions of reduced surface temperature caused by concentrations of magnetic flux that inhibit convection. Sunspots appear within active regions, usually in pairs of opposite magnetic polarity. Their number varies according to the approximately 11-year solar cycle.
SN 1604, also known as Kepler's Supernova, Kepler's Nova or Kepler's Star, was a Type Ia supernova that occurred in the Milky Way, in the constellation Ophiuchus. Appearing in 1604, it is the most recent supernova in the Milky Way galaxy to have been unquestionably observed by the naked eye, occurring no farther than 6 kiloparsecs from Earth. Before the adoption of the current naming system for supernovae, it was named for Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer who described it in De Stella Nova.
David Fabricius was a German pastor who made two major discoveries in the early days of telescopic astronomy, jointly with his eldest son, Johannes Fabricius (1587–1615).
The following is a timeline of Solar System astronomy and science. It includes the advances in the knowledge of the Earth at planetary scale, as part of it.
Spherical Earth or Earth's curvature refers to the approximation of the figure of the Earth as a sphere. The earliest documented mention of the concept dates from around the 5th century BC, when it appears in the writings of Greek philosophers. In the 3rd century BC, Hellenistic astronomy established the roughly spherical shape of Earth as a physical fact and calculated the Earth's circumference. This knowledge was gradually adopted throughout the Old World during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. A practical demonstration of Earth's sphericity was achieved by Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastián Elcano's circumnavigation (1519–1522).
Shen Kuo or Shen Gua, courtesy name Cunzhong (存中) and pseudonym MengqiWeng (夢溪翁), was a Chinese polymath, scientist, and statesman of the Song dynasty (960–1279). Shen was a master in many fields of study including mathematics, optics, and horology. In his career as a civil servant, he became a finance minister, governmental state inspector, head official for the Bureau of Astronomy in the Song court, Assistant Minister of Imperial Hospitality, and also served as an academic chancellor. At court his political allegiance was to the Reformist faction known as the New Policies Group, headed by Chancellor Wang Anshi (1021–1085).
Astronomy in China has a long history stretching from the Shang dynasty, being refined over a period of more than 3,000 years. The ancient Chinese people have identified stars from 1300 BCE, as Chinese star names later categorized in the twenty-eight mansions have been found on oracle bones unearthed at Anyang, dating back to the mid-Shang dynasty. The core of the "mansion" system also took shape around this period, by the time of King Wu Ding.
SN 1054 is a supernova that was first observed on c. 4 July 1054, and remained visible until c. 6 April 1056.
Solar physics is the branch of astrophysics that specializes in the study of the Sun. It deals with detailed measurements that are possible only for our closest star. It intersects with many disciplines of pure physics, astrophysics, and computer science, including fluid dynamics, plasma physics including magnetohydrodynamics, seismology, particle physics, atomic physics, nuclear physics, stellar evolution, space physics, spectroscopy, radiative transfer, applied optics, signal processing, computer vision, computational physics, stellar physics and solar astronomy.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to astronomy:
Shi Shen was a Chinese astronomer and astrologer. He was a contemporary of Gan De born in the State of Wei, also known as the Shi Shenfu.
Ancient Chinese scientists and engineers made significant scientific innovations, findings and technological advances across various scientific disciplines including the natural sciences, engineering, medicine, military technology, mathematics, geology and astronomy.
Wei Pu was a Chinese astronomer and politician of the Song Dynasty. He was born a commoner, but eventually rose to prominence as an astronomer working for the imperial court at the capital of Kaifeng. Wei became a trusted colleague of the famous Song polymath statesman and scientist Shen Kuo, who served as the head official for the Bureau of Astronomy, and worked on various projects with Wei Pu.
In Chinese astronomy, a guest star is a star which has suddenly appeared in a place where no star had previously been observed and becomes invisible again after some time. The term is a literal translation from ancient Chinese astronomical records.
Solar observation is the scientific endeavor of studying the Sun and its behavior and relation to the Earth and the remainder of the Solar System. Deliberate solar observation began thousands of years ago. That initial era of direct observation gave way to telescopes in the 1600s followed by satellites in the twentieth century.
Chinese records of comets are the most extensive and accurate in existence from the ancient and medieval periods, and stretch back across three millennia. Records exist at least as far back as 613 BC, and records may have been kept for many centuries before this. There are continuous records all the way through to the nineteenth century, using substantially consistent methods throughout. Chinese data accuracy is unsurpassed in the ancient world and was not overtaken by Western accuracy until the fifteenth century or, in some respects, not until the twentieth century.
