The history of Astronomy is a great story. It begins with the cultures of prehistory and has not ended yet. It has adventure, discovery, spy stories, intrigue, love, hate and jealousy. It is a real Payton Place.
Please note this all sounds better after a good red wine with dinner, and a port after dinner. Or a few beers with a 6% content around the BBQ (my preference, Victoria Bitter at 305K).
In the beginning the hunter-gathers had it good. Clear skies, dark nights, big animals to eat them and a good imagination. So around the fire at night, eating their antelope, mammoth, bison or kangaroo, they could see nearly all of the (naked eye) stars. The first thing they noticed was that there were patterns, shapes and big lumpy bits. Then there was the Sun and the Moon. The Moon got larger then smaller and then disappeared, then came back again. The Sun made the stars disappear, then it went down and the stars came back. Sometimes the Moon would be big and bright so they could see nearly all night long; which made for some really good parties.
The Sun also got higher in the sky each day and the days got hotter and longer. Then it got lower in the sky each day, it got colder and the animals you hunted went away. This cold and hard time of the year was a real problem for people who had to find their own food on a daily basis and it was recalled and remembered from father to son.
The cold and the hot periods of the year also had a different night sky. As the Sun did its up and down trip it would move across the stars as well. This was the first moving picture ever and was the basis for the stories no one wanted to forget. Stories like
"There is the shape of great Uncle Joe in the sky. He was a really good hunter." or
"There is that emu we were never able to catch and we still can't get him."
So the shapes in the sky had stories to them and they changed from season to season. There would be different stories each night around the cooking fire, or to show the boys that were turning into men, or the girls who were turning into women.
It would also give the people a bit a warning when the animals would start to migrate north or south and give them a chance to stock up and find those berries they liked before they went off. Knowing what the trees, grasses and animals would do and when solved that seasonal problem and was a big step forward. Once you understood it you didn’t have to go so far. You could have a camp that stayed in one place all year round.
There were only a few places in the world where you could find animals you could catch without killing them and only a few places were grasses could be grown and the seeds kept until you wanted to eat them. Then something happened, time started to become important. Now that's not the time we know. That’s the 'get to work', 'catch the train', 'finish the job by', type of time. It was more of the 'plants get ripe' and the 'animals have babies and grow up', type of time.
So again the night sky helped out. First by telling the villagers when the animals where coming into heat, or the seeds were ready to sow. If you wanted to know how long it would be before your sheep had lambs, or your goats had kids, you could count the days. Or if that took too long, count the times you saw the full moon. If you had a jawbone handy and counted the days between the full moons, you would find that it took twenty-seven days before it started its cycle again and in three of the Moon-ths (months) you could expect your lambs.
In some places it became even more important, such as a village near a large river. As the rains upriver flooded the land the river would often flood you as well. It would wash away your live stock, your crops, and your village. If you were not ready, you and your family got washed away also. In some villages the people who knew about the coming of the floods and other things became the wise ones of the village. The villagers would let this bloke wander around all the time doing his wise things.
If this wise bloke could save the village from flooding, tell you when the seasons would change and tell you how long it would be before you had more cattle, it must be worth while leaving him to do his wise things. For most people he could also make you and your family feel better if you got sick and tell you where you go when you die and so on. Even the hunter-gatherers had this type of bloke around and the chief or king had one or more wise men around just to keep things going his way.
So small villages began to turn into great civilisations and the kings became emperors. They became ever more powerful and took over other villages and even other civilisations. Around the kings and emperors there were plenty of these wise men, or wizards and priests. With the priest's help (if you were lucky) you could make it look like you could run the Universe. Build great stone rings that would bring back the Sun after winter and great big mounds of soil or stone to bring you back after you died.
Another thing these wise men ended up doing was keeping written records, which was very handy for an emperor trying to run his empire. The record showed the emperor how his army was getting on taking over villages far away. How much land he had, how many slaves for working the land and what happened in the sky a long time ago. Things like the Sun or the Moon going out, which had a tendency to scare the willies out of all your people and make you look like you were not in control of the Universe. Which in many cases, as in a Solar or Lunar Eclipse, would have the king dragged from his throne out into the street and killed on the spot. Not the way most emperors wanted to go into the next world like.
But if you could go out one day and say to your people
"I'm not happy with you lot and I'm going to take away the Sun or Moon"
and you did, well then they would make sure you were happy. Build for you, and fight wars. Not to mention inflate the goodness out of your ego. In this way the great civilisations of the Stone Age and the Bronze Age got into all sorts of trouble. We must give a big thanks to the Babylonians. This mob kept records for so long that the Greeks ended up using them later on and giving Western Cultures most of their legends and the names we have today for Constellations, Stars, Planets, Months and Days.
Then there were the Planets. They looked like stars but moved around like the Moon and they did some strange things through the year. The Greeks called them Wanderers because they wandered across the sky, backwards and forwards, against the other stars. Most cultures had an explanation for this wondering, though it was not really going to be understood for thousands of years to come. Most of these explanations were super-natural because of the weird way the Planets moved around, not like the stars much at all. So most of the time they were named after Gods to match how super they were.
So now you have why people started looking at the stars and why it is an important part of most of the cultures we know, or have a relationship with. But how did Astronomy turn into a science? Well it didn’t right away. It was improved by a few others until it became what we have today. So lets get back to the Babylonians, the Egyptians and the Greeks to find out what happened next.
Presented by Jim Dale
