CASSINI, G D

Divers Ouvrages d'Astronomie par M Cassini in Memoires de l'Academie Royale des Sciences, Tom V

La Haye, 1731.

First edition.

4to.

Contemporary calf.

Posthumous collection of five important papers by Giovanni Domenico Cassini, who was the first director of the Paris observatory and the patriarch of four generations of famous French astronomers. This entire volume is devoted to his papers, including his famous measurement of the orbits of Jupiter's moons, which he used to measure longitude using the method of Galileo. The book also records the coordinated observations of the parallax of Mars that Cassini made with Jean Richer. This enabled the first precision calculation of the distance from the earth to the sun (Expeditions to observe the transit of Venus).