“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”*…
From the good folks at Chrome Experiments, a wonderfully-informative interactive map of the stars in our corner of the universe. Readers can zoom around our galaxy at “100,000 Stars.”
* Oscar Wilde
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As we pause to celebrate the birth of the archetypical “Renaissance man,” quite possibly the greatest genius of the last millennium, Leornardo da Vinci (born on this date in 1452), we might also send starry-eyed birthday greetings to Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve; he was born on this date in 1793. A renowned astronomer, Struve is known both as the founder of the modern study of binary (double) stars, and as the second in a five-generation-long dynasty of great astronomers: he was the son of the son of Jacob Struve, the father of Otto Wilhelm von Struve, the grandfather of Hermann Struve, the great-grandfather of Otto Struve.
