The Leviathan of Parsonstown:

Literary Technology and Scientific Representation

Presented By: Sourav Kr.BhoumikMS Fellow,7th batch,2014

National Council of Science Museums

Written By-Simon Schaffer

Literary TechnologyTexts as knowledge-producing tool.

The design and use of instrumentation.

Literary technologies are sociohistorically local.

Representations of the natural and social worlds stand independently of their authors.

Scientists make, handle, and translate representations through networks of machines and humans.

Manuscript notes, copper engravings, chart recorder graphs, and computer printouts all-take part in different regimes of representation.

Scientific Representation

Areas of Improvement and Scope

Is not yet so manageable.

Errors derived from its use are enormous.

Vast new opening into science, through which wise men are learning to look.

Sir William Herschel’sContribution

Sir William Herschel was a German-British astronomer.He set up a 20-foot reflector in summer 1782.He developed an extraordinary 40-foot instrument with a

48-inch mirror at Slough between 1786 and summer 1789.

William Herschel’s 40-foot reflecting telescope

The Most Wonderful Object in the HeavensWilliam Herschel said Orion nebula “altogether the most wonderful object in the heavens”.This nebula was the first he recorded in his observing book in March 1774. He thought there was true nebulosity from which stars might develop by condensation.

William Parsons’s Contribution

William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse was an anglo-irish astronomer. His 70 foot telescope, built in 1845 and known of as the "Leviathan of Parsonstown", was the world's largest telescope, in terms of aperture size, until the early 20th century. Rosse's telescope Leviathan was the first to reveal the spiral structure of M51a galaxy nicknamed later as the "Whirlpool Galaxy‘’. In 1867 Rosse and his technicians claimed to have resolved the Orion nebula into its individual stars using the Leviathan.

Drawing of the ‘Whirlpool Galaxy’ by Rosse in 1845

Whirlpool Galaxy M51a

Background, Leviathan of Parsonstown

In western Ireland during the 1830s,Rosse assembled a team of workmen to build a reflector of unprecedented complexity and scale.

Big reflecting telescopes between 1800 and 1850, provide good examples of literary technologies designed to make material technologies into items of individual property and authority.

The Leviathan of Parsonstown

The Leviathan of Parsonstown was a reflector 70 foot in length, carrying a six-foot diameter mirror. It was developed between spring 1842 and spring 1845. It was in many ways the last of its generation. The series of which the Leviathan was a culmination began with the work of William Herschel.

The Leviathan of Parsonstown

The Parsonstown picture of a region of the Orion nebula, completed and published in 1867.

The Leviathan and Its Uses The Leviathan of Parsonstown was represented as a

technological triumph.

It was acceptable as a means of calibrating other instruments.

Can penetrate further stellar layers.

William Herschel vs William ParsonsHerschel's gave the concept of Nebulosity and he showed Orion as the evidence of true nebulosity and the condensation of stars from nebular fluid. But he could not differentiate clearly between irresolvable star clusters and true nebulae.

Rosse came into the field with his giant telescope and challenged the concepts of Herschel's. This is originally inscription of Astronomy.

Conclusion Its resolution at Parsonstown may have been due to

the interposition of many small telescopic stars. In the 1840s and 1850s, the resolution of the Orion

nebula was not a compelling result. The additional power that resolves some nebulae, discovers others having the aspect of milky lights, and to the great telescope of Parsonstown, which can penetrate so profoundly into space.

The Leviathan of Parsonstown can be placed close together with other contemporary technological enterprises to engineer the universe.

THANK YOU