lew (10/26/82)
As an exercise in historical appreciation, I tried comparing my telescopic observations of the Pleiades and Orion with those published by Galileo in "The Sidereal Messenger" (I used "Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo" edited by Stillman Drake.) Galileo's drawing of the Pleiades has 36 stars in it and I could identify all but one of them. Actually there is a very dim candidate star in about the right position, but I wonder if Galileo could have seen it (I suppose he did.) When I looked at his Orion drawing though, I couldn't even get started comparing them with my observation. There didn't seem to be any correlation at all. This is a total mystery to me and I would appreciate any light that anyone can shed on it. (The Orion drawing has about 80 stars.) I don't think that the proper motions of the stars are any where near what would be required to account for this. Also, Galileo's drawings are quite distorted. I attribute this to an extremely small field of view through his primitive telescope. Is this right? But again, that can't account for the total lack of correlation that I find. Lew Mammel, Jr. ihuxr!lew