![]() ![]() Flamsteed retaliated by collecting three hundred of the four hundred printed copies, and burning them. Newton and Halley managed to get hold of most of Flamsteed’s records from the Royal Observatory, and published their own pirated edition of his star catalog in 1712. ![]() ![]() Flamsteed, meticulous to a fault, had spent forty years mapping the heavens-and had still not released his data. ‘Sobel has done the impossible and made horology sexy no mean feat’ New Scientist. With a new Foreword by the celebrated astronaut Neil Armstrong. Yet the world was still waiting on Flamsteed to finish surveying the stars. The tenth anniversary edition of the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest: the search for the solution of how to calculate longitude and the unlikely triumph of an English genius. Thanks to Newton’s own efforts in formulating the Universal Law of Gravitation, the moon’s motion was better understood and to some extent predictable. The lunar distance method that had been proposed several times over preceding centuries gained credence and adherents as the science of astronomy improved. It was clear to him now that any hope of settling the longitude matter lay in the stars. ![]()
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