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This CD-ROM contains many influential and historically important publications about meteorites and meteors. Many of these publications are totally unavailable outside private and major research collections.

It pleases me that they think this page is a good list of links. I created it long before the advent of google, which is where you should go if you don't find what you're looking for here.

With the discovery of an eighth magnitude object near Delta Capricorni on 1846 September 23, J. G. Galle and H. d'Arrest at Berlin successfully concluded the search for Neptune, then the farthest known planet from the Sun. The event was promptly acclaimed, and designated one of the greatest triumphs of celestial mechanics. News reached England on September 30. Next day J. R. Hind announced the discovery in a letter to the London Times where it was avidly read by the owner of the largest telescope in England, William Lassell (1799-1880), the wealthy Liverpool brewer.[

R.P. Greg in his catalogue (1860) lists a stone fall but give no details.

Dogons knew existence and description of Sirius B invisible to naked eye.

For a long time, two separate lines of thought governed our perceptions of tidal friction. Empirical evidence from observations of solar eclipses made as early as in Antiquity pointed to a secular acceleration of the mean angular motion of the Moon amongst the stars which was first noted by Edmund Halley in 1695. However, according to the solitary theoretical speculations of the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1754), oceanic tides retarded the rotation of the earth. When did these two lines of thought converge?

A century ago, at the height of what might be referred to as the "canal furor," Camille Flammarion published the first volume of his great work, La Planète Mars, which summarized what was then known about the planet. In his preface he described how he hesitated between two methods of presenting the state of Martian knowledge---in special chapters dealing with topics such as continents, seas, polar caps, and so on; or chronologically, in the order in which the facts had been obtained. He at length decided on the latter approach, "mainly," he wrote, "because it seemed to me to be the more interesting . . . and also because it provides a better account of the gradual development of our knowledge." So it has seemed to me, and I have done likewise.

Although the numerical methods and parameters found in the Babylonian Astronomical Procedure texts and Ephemerides of the Seleucid Era [310 B.C. - 75 A.D.] have been described in some detail, notably by Neugebauer (1955),1 (1975), 2 Van der Waerden (1974) 3 and others, it is far from certain whether the extant material represents the state of Babylonian astronomy per se, or merely scattered remnants of a larger corpus of knowledge.

Archaeoastronomy has emerged in the last three decades as a thriving `interdiscipline', but it is one that continues to be viewed with suspicion by many mainstream archaeologists. Together with what has become known as ethnoastronomy, it strives to comprehend the nature and meaning of astronomical practice in past (as well as modern non-Western) societies. This has tended to be of particular interest to astronomers and historians of science, but for the archaeologist or anthropologist forms merely one aspect of the study of human societies in general. It is an important one, though: the movements of the heavenly bodies are of almost universal concern, even amongst small bands of hunter-gatherers. Stellar lore and astronomical practice invariably form part of a broader frameworks of understanding--cosmologies--which define and dictate the nature, place and timing of various human actions.

The Manchester Astronomical Society have discovered that a star atlas that has been in their library since before the Second World War is one of only sixteen copies known to exist. This extremely rare atlas was compiled by John Bevis, an eighteenth century physician - turned astronomer, whose other claim to fame is as the discoverer of the Crab Nebula, the wreck of a star that became a supernova in the year 1054 and which is now regarded as a key object of interest with modern astronomers; in the UK particularly with radio astronomers at Jodrell Bank.