Garden of the Night Sky
This method of viewing the galaxies (‘to continue the simile I have borrowed from the vegetable kingdom’) presented the entire universe in a new kind of light, with the most radical implications. ‘The heavens are now seen to resemble a luxuriant garden which contains the greatest variety of productions, in different flourishing beds … and we can extend the range of our experience [of them] to an immense duration.’ In a garden we may live ‘successively to witness the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading, withering and corruption of a plant’. Just so, the universe presented ‘a vast number of specimens, selected from every stage through which the plant passes in the course of its existence’, but brought ‘at once to our eyes’, and viewed at one particular moment from the earth.
See Also: ‘Catalogue of a Second Thousand Nebulae’, 1789, WH Papers 1, pp329-37Notes:
A description of the variety found in the night sky through the newly invented telescope.
Folksonomies: history astronomy perspective
Taxonomies:
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/science/social science/history (0.132255)
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Concepts:
Galaxy (0.974819): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Earth (0.958194): dbpedia | freebase
Universe (0.891286): dbpedia | freebase
Fruit (0.763471): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Time (0.741561): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Astronomy (0.738376): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Plant (0.723226): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Plant morphology (0.692379): dbpedia | freebase | yago