Mystery of the Ashen Light on Venus : investigating a 400-year-old phenomenon / John C. Barentine.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barentine, John C.

Series:

Astronomers' universe

Astronomers' Universe

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History.

Venus (Planet)--Observations--History.

Venus (Planet).

Genre:

Electronic books.

Observations.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Place of Publication:

Cham, Switzerland : Springer, 2021.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

The Ashen Light of Venus -- a ghostly emission of light from the night side of our nearest planetary neighboris among the last unsolved mysteries of astronomical history. In the four centuries since the phenomenon was first reported, highly reputable visual observers of Venus have recorded seeing the Ashen Light, while others have spent a lifetime searching for it without once being convinced that they ever saw it. Is the Ashen Light a trick of the eye? The result of a defective lens? A real scientific event? Occasional references to the Ashen Light are scattered across the literature, yet no work to date has synthesized these records. This book therefore digs deep into the history of the mystery and our latest attempts to understand it, sifting through the clues that might explain whether it is caused by physics, is conjured up by the eye or brain, or a combination of both. This baffling story will appeal to amateur astronomers, hobbyists, and lay readers interested in joining the debate about one of the most elusive observable phenomena ever recorded in the night sky.

Contents:

Intro

Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction

1 Prologue: The Martians That Never Were

2 ``I Could See the Dark Part of Venus...''

Venus in Myth and Tradition

Galileo Discovers the Phases of Venus

3 First Light: Early Accounts of the Ashen Light 1643-1800

The Observations of Giovanni Riccioli (1643)

Early Accounts: 1700-1800

William Derham (c. 1700)

Christfried Kirch (1721)

Andreas Mayer (1759)

William Herschel (1793)

Friedrich von Hahn (1793)

4 Going Mainstream: A Scientific Approach c. 1800-1900

Johann Hieronymus Schröter and Karl Ludwig Harding(1806)

Johann Wilhelm Pastorff (1822)

Franz von Paula Gruithuisen (1825)

The Later Nineteenth Century

5 What Is the Light? Historical Explanations of the Ashen Light

Reflected Light

Aurorae

`Extended Twilight'

Surface or Atmospheric Phosphorescence

Thermal Emission

Surface Ice

Scattered Light and Diffraction Effects

6 Venus as a Knowable World: Chasing the Ashen Light into the Space Age 1900-1980

Daylight Observations

The Barbier Campaign (1935)

Nikolai Kozyrev and the Venus Airglow

The International Geophysical Year (1957-1958)

The Early Spacecraft Era

7 New Ideas for an Old Problem: Observations and Science 1980-2020

The Phillips and Russell Campaign (1988)

Lightning in the Venusian Dark

Active Volcanism

Airglow Revived: New Observations of the ``Green Line''

To the Limits of Human Visual Perception

8 Seeing What We Want to See: The Psychology of the Ashen Light

The Discovery of Neptune

The Cautionary Tale of `Vulcan'

9 Perception Revisited: The Psychophysics of the Ashen Light

The Effects of Observer Bias

Down the (Duck-)Rabbit Hole of Vision Science

Accurate and illusory?

10 Epilogue: Evanescence and Evasion

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (SpringerLink, viewed September 22, 2021).

ISBN:

9783030727154

3030727157

OCLC:

1267687075

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.