And yet the analysis of their activities allows for the complete reconstruction of 17th century astronomy, including its diversification which stemmed from the tensions between tradition and modernity as well as from the specific research interests of minor scholars. Hevelius also exchanged letters with astronomers whose achievements are hardly ever discussed within the framework of the general history of astronomy. Significantly, Hevelius was not only a key agent in the transmission of scientific information among the main centres which, for example, made Gdańsk equally important as London and Paris for early modern uranography. The letters of Johannes Hevelius reveal a very interesting map of the European astronomy of the 17th century. a recognition that the Moon does indeed rotate on its own axis.
The aim of this study is to sketch out the evolution of Kepler's views on the behaviour of the Moon in space, and to show that his considerations of lunar astronomy ultimately led him to an opinion contradicting the one set out in contemporary literature, i.e. In the latter case, a significant moment in the discussion on the subject came with Edward Rosen's decisive comment for the English translation of the "posthumous work on lunar astronomy" by Kepler, which rejects the possibility of rotational lunar motion in the latter's astronomy. The principal manifestation of this conviction is taken to be a part of Book IV of Kepler's Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae, as well as references made in the Somnium, in which Kepler describes the heavens as seen from the lunar surface. In these articles, Johannes Kepler figures as one of many astronomers rejecting the possibility that the Moon rotated in this way. Contemporary literature seeking to tell the story regarding views on the Moon's rotation on its own axis - from ancient times through to the late 17 th century - includes work by Alan Gabbey, as well as by Michel-Pierre Lerner and Susane Débarbat. The reader might then be convinced of the ongoing rotation around his/her own axis by "the unmis-takeable sensation of giddiness." The first solution to the riddle of the invariability of the lunar face in which the physics was correct appeared in the appendix to Nicholas Mercator's Institutionum Astronomicarum libri duo, which presented the earliest version of Isaac Newton's theory of the lunar libration. It could for example involve the circling of a tree with one's face turned towards it. As recently as the mid 19th century, John Herschel noted that "strange to say, there are persons who find it difficult to regard as a rotation on its own axis, that peculiarity of the moon's motion which consists in its keeping the same face always towards the earth." The British astronomer even advocated that readers finding themselves " in this predicament " might go outside and run a little experiment.
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