Astronomical Tables with Precepts both in English and Latin for Computing the Places of the Sun, Moon, Planets, and Comets.

HALLEY, Edmond.

$9,800.00

Item Number: 130557

London: Printed for William Innys in Pater-noster Row, 1752.

First edition in English of Halley’s classic work. Quarto, bound in full morocco with elaborate gilt tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, morocco spine label lettered in gilt, double gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, copper-engraved frontispiece portrait of Halley, illustrated with numerous charts. Edited by John Bevis. Complete with the half-title, license to print, errata and index. In very good condition with light rubbing and wear. Very rare with only 9 copies appearing at auction over the past century.

English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist Edmond Halley catalogued the southern celestial hemisphere and recorded a transit of Mercury across the Sun from an observatory he constructed on the remote tropical volcanic island Saint Helena between 1676 and 1677. Through his observations, Halley discovered that a similar transit of Venus could be used to determine the distances between Earth, Venus, and the Sun. Upon his return to England, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, and with the help of King Charles II, was granted a master's degree from Oxford. His Astronomical Tables contains his discovery of the secular inequality in the moon's mean motion and of the long inequality of Jupiter and Saturn, also a reprint of his famous Synopsis Astronomiae Cometicae which founded the modern science of astronomy and comets, and in which Halley identified the comets of 1531, 1607, and 1692 ("Halley's Comet") as one and the same.