Best-selling author Dava Sobel will give a public talk on April 28 at Yale to kick off a special astronomy exhibit at the Beinecke Rare Book Library. The lecture and exhibition are part of the Department of Astronomy’s year-long series of events to commemorate the International Year of Astronomy.
Best-selling author Dava Sobel will give a public talk on April 28 at Yale to kick off a special astronomy exhibit at the Beinecke Rare Book Library. The lecture and exhibition are part of the Department of Astronomy’s year-long series of events to commemorate the International Year of Astronomy.
Her talk, titled “Galileo and the International Year of Astronomy” will take place at 4:00 p.m. in the Levinson auditorium at the Yale Law School, 127 Wall St. The lecture is free and open to the public. A reception will take place at the Beinecke Library following the lecture.
A former New York Times science reporter, Sobel is the author of “Longitude,” “The Planets” and “Galileo’s Daughter,” which spent five weeks as the #1 New York Times nonfiction bestseller and was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. The book chronicles the work of Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei through more than 100 letters his daughter wrote to him. She has also written for Discover, Life, Audubon and The New Yorker.
The talk will kick off a special exhibit, called Starry Messenger, on view at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library from April 28 through June 30. The exhibit explores the discoveries Galileo made when he first observed the night sky through a telescope 400 years ago, revealing the craters of the moon, the four visible moons of Jupiter, and the instruments of observation used in European astronomy from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century.
The talk and exhibit are two of a number of special events to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, a global effort initiated by the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe. The International Year of Astronomy marks the four hundredth anniversary of the first astronomical observation through a telescope by Galileo.
