On 25th March, 32 of us headed into central London to visit the RAS Library in Burlington House in Piccadilly, 17 for the first afternoon session at 2 pm and 15 for the second evening session at 6 pm. It has been almost 10 years since Flamsteed last visited the Library, and we were delighted to be visiting again after so long!
The RAS has been collecting books, manuscripts, journals, photographs and instruments since it was first established over 200 years ago in 1820. Sian Prosser, Librarian and Archivist, was our host, and Sian talked to us about the library's history and collection, and also had a number of specially selected items for us to look at more closely. I must admit I got quite emotional at seeing a couple of them in particular!
Sian started by talking to us about a small display of items connected with the recent monthly public lecture at the RAS by Dr Heloise Stevance on ‘How can AI help us find exploding stars and hungry black holes?’: (i) John Bevis’ Celestial Atlas, 1786 (published posthumously as his publisher had gone bankrupt and unable to print during his lifetime) (shown in the photo below), (ii) photographs of the Crab Nebula, 1892, by Isaac Roberts, who took the earliest detailed photographs of deep sky objects such as these, and presented them to the RAS, and (iii) Kepler’s plate showing the location of a new star he observed in October 1604 at the foot of the constellation Serpentarius.
Then we were shown items specifically selected for and requested by members:
What is known as the most popular book on astronomy and the oldest influential book in the RAS’s collection (the oldest book in the collection is 13 years older), from 1485, Joannes de Sacro Bosco’s Spherae Tractatus [Treatise of the Sphere] , with many beautiful drawings including 2-colour (rare at the time) drawings of solar and lunar eclipses and of experiments proving that the earth was round!
A 1566 second edition Copernicus’ Heavenly Spheres, exploring his then of course radical model that the sun and not the earth was at the centre of the solar system
Johannes Kepler’s 1625 Rudolphine Tables, page after page of tables of his and Tycho Brahe’s star and planetary observational data (named after Rudoph II, Holy Roman Emperor, who employed them to produce this)
Maria Cunitz’s 1650 Urania Propitia, which included updated and simplified sets of tables (and correcting some of Kepler’s errors in his publication above) and a simpler working solution to Kepler's second law for determining the position of a planet on its elliptical path. Maria Cunitz was one of the earliest published - and acknowledged - female scientific authors
Galileo Galilei’s Complete Works (Volume II), published in 1655, after his death. This includes lots of drawings of what he observed, including Jupiter and its moons (several pages of the positions of the moons, one of the pages is shown in the photo below, the moon (the first time people had seen this level of detail including craters), his discovery of Saturn’s rings, and a letter about sunspots including multiple drawings
A first edition of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687, was shown in both sessions. We were shown a few of the pages including the fold-out drawing of comets (shown in the photo below). The member who requested this attended the first afternoon session, and in this session, there was time too to see the 1716 first translation into English and a 1726 third edition too
Cassini’s moon map, a 1679 engraving, showing an incredible amount of detail including some features which we could not identify (!), and a minute woman’s head in profile he had sneaked in!
Glass plates from Arthur Edington’s 1919 expedition to observe the total solar eclipse on 29th May, one plate from the expedition which went to the West African island of Principe and one from the other to the Brazilian town of Sobral. The measurement of the deflection of the starlight near the sun and the position of stars (which we could not see on the plates unfortunately) proved Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
William Rutter Dawes’ 1850 drawing of Saturn. The member who requested this item is researching Dawes and gave us some interesting information about him, which was very welcome!
It was such a huge privilege to be in such a beautiful space again, to see so many very special items, and to have the Sian’s and our members’ insights on these.
Huge thanks of course to Sian Prosser, our host, and to Kate Bond, Assistant Archivist, who helped with arrangements and security for keeping the RAS open out of hours for us. And of course a massive thank you to all the members who attended and who so generously shared their knowledge and made the visits so interesting.
The RAS are in the process of digitising their collection. If you would like to browse this, go to https://ras.ac.uk/library.
With photos from Yvonne Jacobs, Bobby Manoo and Phil Benson – thank you! – and some from me too
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