BAYER (John)

, a German lawyer and astronomer of the latter part of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, but in what particular year or place he was born, is not certainly known: however, his name will be ever memorable in the annals of astronomy, on account of that great and excellent work which he first published in the year 1603, under the title of Uranometria, being a complete celestial atlas, or large folio charts of all the constellations, with a nomenclature collected from all the tables of astronomy, ancient and modern, with the ufeful invention of denoting the stars in every constellation by the letters of the Greek alphabet, in their order, and according 10 the order of magnitude of the stars in each constellation. By means of these marks, the stars of the heavens may, with as great facility, be distinguished and referred to, as the several places of the earth are by means of geographical tables; and as a proof of the usefulness of this method, our celestial globes and atlasses have ever since retained it; and hence it is become of general use through all the literary world; astronomers, in speaking of any star in the constellation, denoting it by saying it is marked by Bayer, a, or b, or g, &c.

Bayer lived many years after the first publication of this work, which he greatly improved and augmented by his constant attention to the study of the stars. At length, in the year 1627, it was republished under a new title, viz, Coelum Stellatum Christianum, that is, the Christian Stellated Heaven, or the Starry Heavens Christianized: for in this work, the heathen names and characters, or figures of the constellations, were rejected, and others, taken from the scriptures, were in- | serted in their stead, to circumscribe the respective constellations. This was the project of one Julius Schiller, a civilian of the same place. But this attempt was too great an innovation, to sind success, or a general reception, which might occasion great confusion. And, we even sind in the later editions of this work, that the ancient sigures and names were restored again; at least so I find them in two editions, of the years 1654, and 1661, which are now before me.

previous entry · index · next entry

ABCDEFGHKLMNOPQRSTWXYZABCEGLMN

Entry taken from A Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary, by Charles Hutton, 1796.

This text has been generated using commercial OCR software, and there are still many problems; it is slowly getting better over time. Please don't reuse the content (e.g. do not post to wikipedia) without asking liam at holoweb dot net first (mention the colour of your socks in the mail), because I am still working on fixing errors. Thanks!

previous entry · index · next entry

BATTEN
BATTERING
BATTERY
BATTLEMENTS
BAY
* BAYER (John)
BEAD
BEAM
BEAR
BEARD
BEARER