Learning from Galileo's errors

TL;DR

This paper re-analyzes Galileo's early astronomical observations of Jupiter's satellites using modern software, revealing measurement errors and insights into Galileo's observational methods and their accuracy.

Contribution

It provides the first quantitative comparison of Galileo's recorded measurements with reconstructed satellite positions, offering new estimates of his observational errors and resolution.

Findings

Galileo's measurements have a positive bias in errors.

The effective angular resolution of Galileo's observations is quantified.

Galileo's measurement method is shown to be fundamentally flawed.

Abstract

Four hundred years after its publication, Galileo's masterpiece Sidereus Nuncius is still a mine of useful information for historians of science and astronomy. In his short book Galileo reports a large amount of data that, despite its age, has not yet been fully explored. In this paper Galileo's first observations of Jupiter's satellites are quantitatively re-analysed by using modern planetarium software. All the angular records reported in the Sidereus Nuncius are, for the first time, compared with satellites' elongations carefully reconstructed taking into account software accuracy and the indeterminacy of observation time. This comparison allows us to derive the experimental errors of Galileo's measurements and gives us direct insight into the effective angular resolution of Galileo's observations. Until now, historians of science have mainly obtained these indirectly and they are often not correctly estimated. Furthermore, a statistical analysis of Galileo's experimental errors shows an asymmetrical distribution with prevailing positive errors. This behaviour may help to better understand the method Galileo used to measure angular elongation, since the method described in the Sidereus Nuncius is clearly wrong.