/sci/ - Science & Math

>On the night of December 27, 1612, Galileo Galilei was using a telescope to study the moons he had discovered orbiting Jupiter two years earlier. Sharing the field of view was, he thought, an ordinary “star.” He drew the position of the star relative to Jupiter and its moons, and repeated the observation the next night; on the second night he noticed that the position of the fixed star was now a bit farther away from another star he had recorded on the previous night. What he didn’t know (and died not knowing), was that he had made the first sightings of the planet Neptune 234 years before its official discovery in 1846 — when the planet was in a very close conjunction with Jupiter.