History of Astronomy

It is not farfetched to say that the story of astronomy started when the first human looked up at the beautiful sky above. Nevertheless, when it comes to the history of astronomy as a science, we deal with recorded data. And this is where we find all sorts of material from several thousands of years ago to the present day, in different languages, from the ancient and forgotten to the modern, covering a diverse geographical and cultural background. Studying these traditions reveals levels of complexity, some of which are yet to be deciphered.

But as modern scientists, how much are we aware of the history of astronomy? Or better yet, to what extent do we care about it? Due to some shortcomings in teaching curriculums designed for science education, many of us might think that astronomy started by Newtonian physics, or by the invention of the telescope, or at best by Copernicus’ heliocentric system and Kepler’s rules. We aim here to challenge this picture and show the continuous nature of astronomy by discussing some of the major contributions made by people from different cultures. Our goal here certainly is not to provide a comprehensive history of astronomy, rather, based on the studies that have been conducted on the history of astronomy, we wish to draw the attention of our scientist readers to some specific topics.

The science of astronomy was taken seriously by many civilizations for different purposes. People from these civilizations interacted with each other and collaborated one what can be called the universal history of astronomy. Nevertheless, treating the history of astronomy with a focus on specific cultural backgrounds has some advantages. That is why, in some of our articles on this website, we aim to situate topics in their specific cultural contexts. In the below articles, we will discuss topics in the broader context of the history of astronomy.