Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.15438

    Mira of Cetus

    Date
    17th century
    Creator
    Unknown, Artist
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Manuscript page number
    p1
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (page): 162mm
    width (page): 290mm
    Subject
    Content object
    map
    space
       > star
    Description
    Drawing of the constellation of Cetus and others with scales.

    This appears to record observations of the variable star Mira of Cetus between 10 and 18 March of an unknown year. The text records that it was 'Drawn from the french Padres draft', which may suggest that it was copied from the papers of Ismael Bullialdus, a French mathematician and Catholic priest who reported on this star in Ad astronomos monita duo (1667). This work was reported in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society vol. 1, no. 21 (1667). Bullialdus was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in April 1667.
    Object history
    For Bullialdus’s observation of Mira of Cetus, see The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. by A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, 13 vols (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; London: Taylor and Francis, 1965-86), III (1966), 329n3 (no. 602).

    For another, later report on Mira of Cetus, see the letter from Henry Sivers to Oldenburg dated 23 June 1673 (EL/S1/124), in ibid., X (1975), 45-56 (no. 2259).
    Related fellows
    Ismael Bullialdus (1605 - 1694, French) , Clergyman
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > France
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > United Kingdom
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