Reading Nature, Observing Science: Examining Material Practices in the Lick Observatory Archives and Kenneth S. Norris Papers

Connections: Materials of Observation

Astronomers kept individual copybooks and scrapbooks in which they used sketches, illustrations, and visually descriptive language alongside numeric charts to record their observations. Charles Perrine's copybook describes his day-to-day observations of comets; Perrine's descriptions perhaps speak to the way in which it is difficult to describe something like light in purely objective terms, untouched by the discourse of aesthetics. In this set of charts from Edward Holden's scrapbook, Holden uses different shades of blue pen to represent the distribution of stars in the southern sky; the careful uniformity of these markings speaks to an aesthetic effort. The scrapbook also contains some illustrations of Jupiter, though Holden discounts them as having "no artistic merit." In what ways does the history of astronomical discovery at the Lick, often represented as a series of technologically impressive and visually impressive photographs produced by automated telescopes, omit the modes of observation and material practices archived here?

Contents of this tag:

This page references: