Abstract
IN the New York Nation for January 11, 1894, Dr. D. C. Oilman, President of the Johns Hopkins University, called attention to an interesting letter from John Winthrop, jun., to Sir Robert Moray, concerning the satellites of Jupiter. In this letter, which was written from Hartford, Connecticut, on January 27, 166?, Winthrop described an observation of Jupiter which he had made on the night of the previous 6th of August, when he had very distinctly seen five satellites about that planet. He was naturally “not with out some consideration whether that fifth might not be some fixt star with which Jupiter might at that tyme be in neare conjunction,” and expressed the wish that more frequent observations might be made upon that planet with a view to ascertaining whether it is not impossible to discern a fixed star, when it is so near to the planet as to appear “within the periphery of that single intuitus by a tube which taketh in the body of Jupiter,”and if so, whether his star is not a new satellite.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
JOHNSON, C. Pseudo-Satellites of Jupiter in the Seventeenth Century. Nature 51, 285–287 (1895). https://doi.org/10.1038/051285a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/051285a0