LALANDE (Jérôme de). Abrégé d'Astronomie. Paris,... Lot 40

LALANDE (Jérôme de). Abrégé d'Astronomie. Paris, Veuve Desaint, 1774, 8°, XXXVI-507-1 bl. p., 16 folding plates, full contemporary speckled calf (corners dulled, jaws cracked at the beginning). First edition. Lalande lists the hundred constellations then in use. Nowadays, the International Astronomical Union lists 88 of them. From the 48 constellations defined by Ptolemy, navigators traveling in the southern hemisphere had established new ones and Tycho Brahe had raised the Hair of Berenice to the rank of constellation. Johann Bayer published them in 1603, in Uranometria. From this date, various astronomers added others. For example, Jakob Bartsch (1600-1633) created four, Johann Hevelius seven and Abbot la Caille fourteen, while he was mapping the southern sky during his stay in Cape Town. (...) Lalande knew the difficulties encountered by his students. He recommended them to buy a celestial sphere so that they could better understand the explanations he gave during his courses. (...) Numerous plates allow the students to fully exploit this work (Here, as an example, plate XV). The fig.112 exposes the parallax of the Jovian satellites. Fig.113 gives eleven parabolas (graduated in days) which illustrate the trajectories of comets in the vicinity of the Sun and fig.114 shows how to measure the displacement of a sunspot. (Philippe Garcelon).