The research carried out so far on the identification of constellations in the Inka civilisation is far from exhaustive, as there is both a great difficulty in obtaining the data and much heterogeneity in the information gathered. A brief presentation is given here.

This paper reviews the history of Chinese astronomy from the perspective of the rôle it played in establishing the Heaven-Man relationship in ancient China, which was politically and morally significant, and which in turn gave Chinese astronomy its most important characteristics.

China, a country with a long history and a specific culture, has also a long and specific astronomy. Ancient Chinese astronomers observed the stars, named and distributed them into constellations in a very specific way, which is quite different from the current one. Around the Zodiac, stars are divided into four big regions corresponding with the four orientations, and each is related to a totem, either the Azure Dragon, the Vermilion Bird, the White Tiger or the Murky Warrior. We present a general pattern of the ancient Chinese constellations, including the four totems, their stars and their names.

The communal tombs (‘dolmens’) constructed through Europe and the Mediterranean region in the late Neolithic nearly always had an entrance to permit the introduction of further bodies, and hence an orientation. Extensive fieldwork shows that the builders always felt constrained to observe a custom of orientation, and in most of Western Europe the custom may well have been to face the rising Sun at some time of year, or the Sun after it had risen. But at Fontvieille near Arles the local custom was quite different, with tombs facing sunset or the Sun when descending. In southwest France and neighbouring parts of Cataluña the two customs are in conflict.

Celestial events often exerted a great or even decisive influence on the life of ancient communities. They may provide some of the foundations on which an understanding of the deeper meaning of mythologies, religious systems and even folk tales can be based. These influences are reflected and may be detected in the archaeological material as well. There is good evidence that celestial (especially solar and perhaps lunar) phenomena played a particularly important rôle in the worldview of prehistoric Europe. To reveal the social and ideational significance of concepts relating to the celestial bodies in the prehistory of the Carpathian Basin, complex investigations on orientations of houses and graves, prestige archaeological finds and iconography have been accomplished. The results indicate ideological and/or social changes, which developed into a likely organized ideological system in large part of Central Europe including the Carpathian Basin by the Late Bronze Age. It might also be the first period in prehistory when people became really interested in celestial phenomena.

In this review the oldest known advanced astronomical instrument and dedicated analogue computer is presented, in context. The Antikythera Mechanism a mysterious device, assumed to be ahead of its time, probably made around 150 to 100 BCE, has been found in a 1st century BCE shipwreck near the island of Antikythera in a huge ship full of Greek treasures that were on their way to Rome. The Antikythera Mechanism is a clock-like device made of bronze gears, which looks much more advanced than its contemporary technological achievements. It is based on mathematics attributed to the Hipparchus and possibly carries knowledge and tradition that goes back to Archimedes, who according to ancient texts constructed several automata, including astronomical devices, a mechanical planetarium and a celestial sphere. The Antikythera Mechanism probably had a beautiful and expensive box; looking possibly like a very elaborate miniature Greek Temple, perhaps decorated with golden ornaments, of an elegant Hellenistic style, even perhaps with automatic statuettes, ‘daemons’, functioning as pointers that performed some of its operations. Made out of appropriately tailored trains of gears that enable to perform specialised calculations, the mechanism carries concentric scales and pointers, in one side showing the position of the Sun in the ecliptic and the sky, possibly giving the time, hour of the day or night, like a clock. The position of the Moon and its phase is also shown during the month. On the other side of the Mechanism, having probably the size of a box (main part 32×20×6 cm), are two large spiral scales with two pointers showing the time in two different very long calendars, the first one concerning the eclipses, and lasting 18 years 11 days and 8 hours, the Saros period, repeating the solar and lunar eclipses, and enabling their prediction, and the 19 year cycle of Meton, that is the period the Moon reappears in the same place of the sky, with the same phase. An additional four-year dial shows the year of all Greek Festivities, the so-called ‘games’ (Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian etc). Two additional dials give the Exeligmos, the 54 year and 34 day cycle, which provides a more accurate prediction of eclipses. It is possible that the Mechanism was also equipped with a planetary show display, as three of the planets and their motion (stationary points) are mentioned many times in the manual of the instrument, so it was also a planetarium. From the manual we have hints that the mechanism was probably also an observational instrument, as having instructions concerning a viewfinder and possibly how to orient the viewfinder to pass a sunbeam through it, probably measuring the altitude of the Sun. There are fragmented sentences that probably give instructions on how to move the pointers to set the position of the Sun, the Moon and the planets in their initial places in the ecliptic, on a specific day, or how to measure angular distances between two celestial bodies or their coordinates. This mechanism is definitely not the first one of its kind. The fact that it is accompanied with instructions means that the constructor had in its mind to be used by somebody else and one posits that he made at least another similar instrument.

Research in Islamic science over the last half century or so has clearly established that such old myths as Islamic science being a preservation of Greek science, or that science was always in conflict with religion in Islamic civilization as it was in Europe, or that the European scientific Renaissance was independent of outside influences –a European phenomenon par excellence– are now all subjects of great dispute if not altogether dead. In what follows I will illustrate the evidence that has put such myths into question with only few examples, since time and space do not allow me to elaborate more.

The Sultanate of Oman is possibly unique in using stars to time the allocation of water in the traditional irrigation systems called aflāj (s. falaj), which are still an important part of Omani culture and sense of national identity. This is a rapidly disappearing oral tradition that has hardly been known about outside Oman prior to this study. The need for timing water shares is explained and the methods of stargazing described. The identities of the stars, their Omani names and the relationship with modern star names are discussed.

The International Year of Astronomy marks the 400th anniversary of Kepler's Astronomia nova and the first use of the telescope for astronomy, most notably leading to Galileo's Sidereus nuncius (1610). Kepler's book for the first time argued strongly for a physical basis to astronomical explanations. Galileo's work showed that a coherent understanding was more important for scientific progress than specific proofs. The efforts of both astronomers undermined the traditional geocentric cosmology and essentially brought about the birth of modern astronomy.

Models of the universe, in the sense of solutions to the cosmological field equations, took their start in 1917 with Einstein's closed universe. During the next two decades they were developed to comprise evolving models, some of them cyclic and some of them with a definite age. The history of this development, as it occurred up to the mid 1930s, is reviewed. It is argued that in 1930-31, cosmology experienced a kind of paradigm shift.

The personality of Edward Milne is examined, deepening the historical period in which his Cosmological theory was produced. Is suggested that Milne's kinematical Cosmology can be regarded as a kind of ‘resistance’ to the scientific revolution deriving from the new Einstein's theory of gravitation. Is investigated the deep philosophical meaning of the metrics on curved manifolds as far as the representation of the universe is concerned, and the importance of the cosmological theories in the epistemology and in the evolution of science is stressed.

Launched in 1887, the “Carte du Ciel” was an international project aiming at photographing the entirety of the celestial vault. Tasks required for this huge undertaking were divided among 18 observatories around the globe. Instruments were standardized and a series of international conferences established operating modes and prescribed norms to be followed everywhere. In each observatory, however, the drive toward uniformity ran into a variety of minor technical and practical problems. In this paper, we examine the strategies mobilized by observers to tinker with stated rules and adapt them to their own experience as astronomers. To underscore the tension between normative prescriptions and individual practices, we consider the Bulletin of the Permanent International Committee for the execution of the Carte du Ciel as an informal forum where various queries raised and arrangements adopted were shared among the scientific community.

After World War I, the foundation of the International Astronomical Union delimited a space for a new form of internationality, which led to a rapid change in the way astronomical research had previously been pursued. This structure was to be a sort of parliament of astronomical nations which planned to supervise scientific programs and to rationalise inter-observatory cooperation. In this article, I will discuss the sociological aspects of this institutional process and introduce the idea of ‘scientific diplomacy’.

The teaching and the popularization of Astronomy, nowadays, suffers from the absence of attractiveness. It's, somehow, consensual that the most efficient approach to attract the general public or even an uninterested student to the Astronomy is the sky observation. With the help of instruments like telescopes or binoculars, the observation of aesthetical impressive objects such as galactic clusters, approaching planets and many others may have a great impact upon those people. We have been executing an efficient and attractive didactic method which has been evaluated permanently for more than two years and has shown great efficiency that consists in the utilization of legends and myths from different cultures (including Brazilian Indians myths, in an etnoastronomical approach) about the constellations and their dispositions in the sky. The objective of this panel is to show the efficiency of the method and some of its teaching routines always beginning with myths or legends involving a great number of constellations (using, preferentially, most of the watchable sky in a certain time of year), using asterisms for identification and then following to a certain constellation from which it is possible to extract the information required for the studied subject.

A survey of the worldwide litterature reveals that the question “Are we alone in the Universe?” has been formulated only in the “western” litterature. Here I try to understand why it is so. To investigate this problem it is first necessary to clarify what western culture means.

To date, among the hundred or so minor planets we discovered with various instruments around the world, twenty of these objects have been definitively numbered and named. We have choosen the names according to our centers of interest. In honouring people in domains as varied as astronomy, astronautics, music, paleontology, comic strips, . . . we had the opportunity of establishing fruitful relationships with a large horizon of cultures. It was also a good opportunity for the diffusion of astronomy towards other communities.

With these sung words a grandmother, a teacher of the Waitaha Maori people of New Zealand, sets in motion the telling of the great patterns of journeys. These journeys to and from distant shores are still in the minds and memories of the elder grandparent teachers of the Waitaha people.

We present the results of the ICOMOS international symposium “Cultural Heritage of Astronomical Observatories (around 1900) – From Classical Astronomy to Modern Astrophysics” (Oct. 2008). The objective of the symposium was to discuss the relevance of modern observatories to the cultural heritage of humankind and to select partner observatories which, due to the date of their construction or to their architectural or scientific importance are comparable to Hamburg Observatory, as international cooperation partners for a serial trans-national application.

With over 80 years of existence, Bosscha Observatory in Lembang, West Java, Indonesia, still stands as one of the largest observatories that is registered by International Astronomical Union in the South East Asia region. Since first commissioned by the NISV (Netherlands Indische Sterrenkundige Vereeniging), Bosscha Observatory had played a major role in astronomy, particularly in research and observational activities in the southern hemisphere. But the current development has produced a serious impact on Bosscha Observatory, both tangible and intangible. With the challenges Bosscha Observatory faced the past decades, what can be done in the future to conserve not only the tangible value but most importantly the intangible value it embraces for the scientific development? This paper emphasizes its values, and opens some perspectives and ideas for conserving a (candidate to) Astronomy and World Heritage site. This important issue of how to best preserve the scientific value of this scientific heritage it embodied is discussed in some detail.

En 1665, Adrien Auzout (1622-1691) figure parmi les membres des cercles scientifiques qui fleurissent en France depuis une trentaine d'années. Une comète est apparue l'année précédente et il adresse à Louis XIV son «Ephéméride du Comète» [sic] correspondant à cette voyageuse. Cette épître permet de voir combien art et science sont pour lui étroitement associés. L'observatoire Royal créé deux ans plus tard illustrera cette interaction comme le montre l'examen de ses collections.