Argelander

“We have this enormous field of view,” said Reiko Nakajima, an astronomer at the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at the University of Bonn in Germany, at the recent press conference.

A team led by Hendrik Hildebrandt of the Argelander Institute for Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and Massimo Viola of Leiden University in the Netherlands examined galaxy images taken by the European Southern Observatory's VLT Survey Telescope in Chile as part of the Kilo-Degree Survey.

Although it is dwarfed by the largest instruments elsewhere, “an awful lot of state-of-the-art science is still being carried out with 2- to 4-meter telescopes,” says Hendrik Hildebrandt, an astronomer at the Argelander Institute for Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

The estimates of Argelander, Heis, and Houzeau are based on the same scale as that used by Ptolemy and Al-Sufi.

In the preface to his translation of Al-Sufi’s work, Schjellerup mentions some remarkable discrepancies between the magnitudes assigned to certain stars by Ptolemy and Argelander.