This is an historical question, and I've looked using "The Google" a number of times and come up empty, and this seems a fair place to ask.

Sometime during my youthful science education, I recall a story told in a textbook about a "change" in an astronomical fact. My memory is that there was a controversy about how many somethings there were in or around something else -- like moons around a planet, perhaps. The story was that there was a famous picture that had been used to count all the things, and widely reprinted, with overlayed circles defining the things. And everyone agreed. Then, a number of years later, better images were acquired, and lo, they got a different answer. When they went back to check, it looked like the old picture had the same number as well, despite the circles and lines that had been drawn (erroneously) before.

Does this ring any bells for anyone?

If I can find a cite, its an intriguing reference for another scientific debate.

thanks,

-dB

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Welcome to the board dbrower. I'm not sure what exactly you might be referring to so I'm going to take a guess and go with Saturn's Rings and the various discoveries of rings and shepard moons. The website that I linked to gives a good history of the discoveries.

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Saturns rings make a likely candidate, but I don't think that was it. It seems more likely to be moons, perhaps of Jupiter, Saturn, or Uranus.

The fascinating detail to me was the existence of the "old" photos with the circled things to be counted, and the "new" photo, going back to the old one showing some of the old circles were wrong.

Maybe this will ring a bell for someone else, or someone can tell me that I hallucinated this whole juvenile memory.

thanks!

-dB

Welcome

I'm not sure if this is what you were after, Here is the article where I read about it.

It was about hypothetical planets and moons and at one point, Venus was suspected of having a moon. Observations made by different people at different times even allowed the orbit to be determined. When other people came onlong to look for it, it was gone. Going back over the previous observations it was found that there just happened to be a number of faint background stars in the right spot to bee seen as a moon.

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That's pretty good! I'll take some time to digest it, but the example I'm looking for may be in there. The case of Saturn's Themis, and later of Janus and Epithemis may be good ones to work with.

thanks!

-dB

Do you know roughly what year this would have been?

I'm talking about a school book I would have seen in the 60's, probably discussing science from, about 1900 to maybe 1930. There may have been a discussion of Lowell's erstwhile canals in the vicinity. As I'm 50, recalling memories of age 12-15, I know my own recall is dubious.

thanks,
-dB

Not old, not senile, just mad enough to be here.... Welcome.

I am only five years more mature than you... I think this was about the moons in Saturn's rings. I may be wrong for the same reason as you suggested.

I was wrong once, but may have been mistaken then also. :

I seem to remember this from highschool astronomy class too, altho I was in a program where I came in to school extra early so i could leave early (for work), thus my astronomy class was at like 6:30am, and for a highschooler that went to bed around 2am every night(morning), that was waay to early. I think half of what i remember from that class were my sleep-deprived halucanations.

But anyway i seem to remember how they tried to determine the number of saturns moons from pictures of the rings. or something.

edit: BTW tog, very interesting site. had to add it to my favorites so i can read all the way through it.

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