Astronomy and History of Science
An observer of objects in the solar system, Schiaparelli worked with binary stars, discovered the asteroid 69 Hesperia on April 26, 1861, and demonstrated that the Perseids and Leonids meteor showers were associated with comets. He proved, for example, that the orbit of the Leonids meteor shower coincided with that of the Comet Tempel-Tuttle. These observations led the astronomer to formulate the hypothesis, subsequently proved to be very exact, that the meteor showers could be the trails of comets.
Schiaparelli was a scholar of the history of classical astronomy. He was the first to realize that the concentric spheres of Eudoxus of Cnidus and Callippus, unlike those used by many astronomers of later times, were not to be taken as material objects, but only as part of an algorithm similar to the modern Fourier series.
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