Yesterday a colleague of mine at the Royal Library in Copenhagen showed me a wonderful book: Theatrum Cometicum (youtube vid of illustrations) by Stanislaw Lubieniecki. The edition was absolutely stunning - the illustrations were all hand colored beautifully and appeared with great clarity on the page. A great part of the book concerns a comet seen in 1664 and 1665. This wonderful find from our vaults left me with two questions that I haven’t really been able to answer to my satisfaction by means of googling:
The first question is in regard to the 1664 comet: What do we know about the 1664 comet? From the book it appears to have been observed all over Europe at the time. I know it wasn’t Halley’s Comet, but is it one we can expect will return? How was its appearance interpreted at the time (for instance: was it considered a bad omen like the 1618 comet?)?
The second question is about Lubieniecki and his work: Who was he? - Wikipedia tells us precious little about the man. What was the impact of his work?
Most comets are either on open orbits, and will therefore swing through the inner system once and only once, never to return, or extremely long-period, such that even if they do return, it might not be for thousands of years. Halley’s Comet is remarkable in that it does return on a reasonable time scale; any given historical comet (especially if it’s known not to be Halley) is very likely to be a non-returner.
In principle, if Lubieniecki left good enough observational records (where exactly he saw it in the sky, on exactly what dates, and on at least three and preferably more widely-separated dates), the orbit could be determined, and we could say definitively whether it’d return, but I don’t know if his data are good enough for that.
I’ll split the questions slightly differently, if I may.
Yes, the 1664 comet attracted a substantial amount of interest and observers in Europe and beyond. Peyps mentioned it in his diary on a couple of occasions and noted that Charles II had been keen to see it. (A couple of the following links come from the annotators on that Pepys Diary website.) Another royal to take interest was Queen Christina - by then in exile in Rome - who observed it with one of the Cassinis. Rather less publically, a then-obscure undergraduate at Trinity College in Cambridge made notes of his observations. And across the Atlantic a pamphlet on the comet was published by Samuel Danforth.
This was one of the comets examined by Halley in his investigations of their orbits. Using Helvetius’s observations from Danzig, he got a good fit with a parabola. (Which was about the limits of the period - he had to recognise that some comets fitted the same parabola before being able to propose closed orbits. For any single passage, the data was consistent with a parabola.) However, this page suggests that later calculations still give a parabola. Which implies that it’s probably a long-period comet of unknown period.
Schnechner’s Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Princeton, 1997) suggests that the second half of the 17th century sees a geographical split developing in attitudes about comets. So while Lubieniecki was in touch with the Royal Society and exchanging letters with them about comets, his attitude was less “modern” than Oldenburg and his mates. In England she argues that the tradition of seeing comets as portents - along with astrology - was already unfashionable, even in society at large, while older attitudes lingered in Eastern Europe with Lubieniecki as an example.
Can’t say much about Lubieniecki’s life. The Theatrum Cometicum is familiar mainly because it’s a convenient source for picture editors looking for early modern illustrations of comets. Newton owned a copy - Harrison’s modern catalogue of his library notes that the first volume only is dogged at the edges - but little can be read into that.
Thanks, both of you. I think I’ll try to get hold of a copy of Schechner’s book - it certainly looks like an interesting read.
It seems a bit odd to me that Lubieniecki’s “heritage” as far as astronomy goes consists of pretty drawings and not any “real” contributions to the field. I wonder if there were others who published similar works around the same time?
Well, I was trying to suggest that he was someone who had come to be remembered for the illustrations. He clearly had a readership at the time, but that never seems to have translated into any permanent influence on the field.
As a parallel example of a roughly contemporary astronomer (and much else) now far more widely remembered for the illustrations to his books than their texts and ideas: Athanasius Kircher. Illustrations like those of Noah’s Ark, a magic lantern, the Tower of Babel, the location of Atlantis, pyramids or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon will often be familiar to people to whom his name means nothing.
Of course, Kircher was a famous figure in his day and there’s substantial scholarly interest in him for that reason, but it’s the illustrations that he’s best remembered for.
