The Hill--Brown theory of the Moon's motion. Its coming-to-be and short-lived ascendancy (1877-1984)

DOI10.1007/978-1-4419-5937-9MaRDI QIDQ983264zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Curtis Wilson

Publication date 5 August 2010

Published in Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5937-9

zbMATH Keywords

ephemeridesorbital elementsperturbation theory

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

History of mathematics in the 19th century (01A55) History of mathematics in the 20th century (01A60) History of mechanics of particles and systems (70-03) Celestial mechanics (70F15)

Review text

This excellent book is a cornerstone in the history of astronomy. It deals with the Hill-Brown theory of the Moon's motion between 1877 and 1984. This theory was the basis for lunar ephemerides in the nautical almanacs up to 1985. In Part I, G.W. Hill's mathematical theory is summarized in the form of a modified restricted three-body system. The new ideas concerning the Moon's inequalities on his orbit are explained. Part II gives the complete theory by E. W. Brown and the construction of tables making possible the predictions and computation of ephemerides. Part III describes the revolutionary developments in time measurements and distance determinations for the Moon's motion since 1950, which led to the replacement of the Hill-Brown theory in 1984. This lively written book contains many biographical notes and well-founded historical comments, and thus can be recommended to amateurs in astronomy and science history, and to instructors and scholars interested in the rapid development of astronomy and physics.

Recommendations

• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 4178834
• On a new analytic theory of the Moon's motion. III: Further corrections
• On a new analytic theory of the Moon's motion. I: Orbital angular momentum
• On a new analytic theory of the Moon's motion. II: Orbit and length of months
• Between theory and observations. Tobias Mayer's explorations of lunar motion, 1751-1755
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 220969

Cited in

(11)

• The controversy surrounding the secular acceleration of the Moon's mean motion
• The triaxiality role in the spin-orbit dynamics of a rigid body
• Leonhard Euler's early lunar theories 1725--1752
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 193213 (Why is no real title available?)
• The coming-to-be of Hansen's method
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 816089 (Why is no real title available?)
• Canonical transformations from Jacobi to Whittaker
• From Babylonian lunar observations to Floquet multipliers and Conley–Zehnder indices
• Ibn al-Zarqālluh's discovery of the annual equation of the Moon
• Physical vs. numerical approximation in Isaac Newton's \textit{Principia}
• Floquet theory for integral and integro-differential equations

This page was built for publication: The Hill--Brown theory of the Moon's motion. Its coming-to-be and short-lived ascendancy (1877-1984)

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q983264)