First known use of Telescope in Indian Soil.

First known use of Telescope in India

We now know that Galileo used the Telescope in the year 1609 and this year we are celebrating the 400th year of the telescope. We also saw in the earlier post that Thomas Harriot used the telescope earlier to Galileo and his sketches of moon are available in the public domain too.

Now it will be interesting to see, when the telescope was used in India. It was generally believed that the French Jesuit Father Jean Richaud was the first person to use a telescope in India in 1689 with a telescope of about 12 feet focus. Richaud observed a comet during 1699 December and discoverd that the Alpha Centauri is a double star. He also estimated the latitude and longitude of Pondicherry. But a paper by RK Kochhar of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics which appeared in the Indian Journal of History of Science 24(3): 186-192 (1989) points that it was not Father Richaud who used the telescope first in India.

IT was Jeremiah Shakerley who was born in 1626 at Yorkshire, England who used the telescope first in Indian soil. He emigrated to Surat in India. East India Company had already set up its first trading post at Surat in 1612. It was from Surat that Shakerley observed the transit of Mercury in the year 1651. It is believed that Shakerley died in 1655 in Surat.


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Was Galileo second fiddle--er, telescope--to Harriot?


This is Year 2009. The International Year of Astronomy (IYA), now under way, marks the 400th anniversary of the year that famed Italian astronomer Galileo began observing and documenting the heavens with increasingly powerful telescopes.

But in a paper in the current Astronomy & Geophysics, University of Oxford historian Allan Chapman argues that a less renowned astronomical pioneer deserves recognition as well. Thomas Harriot, an English mathematician, apparently turned a telescope to the sky even before Galileo did, producing a moon sketch that Chapman says is "the oldest known drawing of a telescopic body, made nearly four months before Galileo's first drawing."

Harriot's sketch, pictured here and dated July 26, 1609, is fairly rudimentary, but his moon maps became increasingly detailed as the years passed, as shown by the undated sketch at right. He remains relatively unknown for his contributions to astronomy, compared to Galileo at least, because he did not publish his work and, according to Chapman, never made a public claim for his milestone achievement.

Chapman notes that Harriot seems to have kept pace with his more famous contemporary, independently discovering sunspots in 1610 before Galileo had published or publicly presented his discovery of the phenomenon.

Even if Harriot remains overshadowed by Galileo and other famous names of astronomy, he will at least get his day this summer, when the IYA honors the anniversary of Harriot's first moon drawing at a July 26 event, Telescope400. See http://www.telescope400.org.uk for more details.


photo credits: www