The Adolfo Stahl lectures in astronomy, delivered in San Francisco, California, in 1916-17 and 1917-18, under the auspices of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1919)
Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Aitken, Robert Grant, 1864-1951 · San Francisco Stanford University Press · leaf 211
was not known that the Earth is spherical until Magellanproved it by circumnavigating the globe. The first determination of the distance from the Earth tothe Sun was made by Aristarchus, 3d century B.C. Thisdetermination was highly ingenious, correct geometrically butyielding a very inaccurate… … Fig. 9. Aristarchuss Method of Determining the Distance fromTHE Earth to the Sun. To Eratosthenes, 2d century B.C., is due the first measure-ment of the size of the Earth. At noonday, at the summersolstice, the sun shone vertically down a well at Syene, inUpper Egypt, while in Alexandria, at the…
Astronomy
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