NEXT year, 2009, is the . It commemorates the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescopic sightings of objects that no one before him had been able to see. They included craters on the moon, stars invisible to the naked eye, and on 7 January 1610 the moons of Jupiter, which named “the Medicean stars” after his patron, Grand Duke Cosimo II de Medici.
Astronomy is often described as the first science, in honour of the acute and patient Babylonian observers whose gazings on the spectacular canopy of the heavens produced the first systematic astronomical data. That…
