On the morning of April 17, 2010, the naming ceremony for the LAMOST telescope was officially held. The LAMOST telescope was officially named the Guo Shoujing Telescope. For more details, please refer to the news reports published recently.
From Guo Shoujing’s Compilation of the “Shoushi Calendar” to the Emergence of LAMOST
“The ‘Shoushi Calendar’ compiled by Guo Shoujing and others during the Yuan Dynasty of China can still predict modern solar eclipses.” This was stated by Li Yong, an associate researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), during his report at the “International Symposium Commemorating the 730th Anniversary of the Establishment of the Yuan Dadu Observatory and the Development of Astronomical Instruments and Astronomy.”
Li Yong explained that the “Shoushi Calendar” was completed in 1280 and used from 1281 to 1644. It is a highly accurate and prestigious calendar that integrates the great achievements of various traditional Chinese calendars, and research interest in it remains high both domestically and abroad. Compared with modern astronomical prediction methods, the error of the “Shoushi Calendar” is only one ten-thousandth per century. For the total solar eclipse that occurred on July 22 last year [2009], the duration of totality reached 6 minutes; the path of totality crossed several large and medium-sized cities in the Yangtze River basin, from Chengdu and Chongqing in the southwest to Wuhan, Hefei, and finally Hangzhou and Shanghai. The “Shoushi Calendar’s” prediction for the time of maximum eclipse in the Beijing area for this total solar eclipse had an error of only 56 minutes.
Li Yong said that during the Yuan and Ming dynasties, traditional Chinese calendars represented by the “Shoushi Calendar” (including the “Datong Calendar”) reached their peak in terms of calculation and development. Advanced calendrical techniques are inseparable from advanced astronomical observations, theories, and instruments.
Ma Ruihong, deputy director of the Education and Promotion Department of the Guo Shoujing Memorial Hall in Xingtai City, Hebei Province, spoke at the symposium, noting that Guo Shoujing made many innovations in the development of his most representative astronomical instruments, such as the “Simplified Armillary” (Jianyi). For example, the invention of rolling bearings in the Simplified Armillary was more than 200 years earlier than the roller bearings designed by Leonardo da Vinci during the Western Renaissance. The design of the equatorial device on the Simplified Armillary was more than 300 years earlier than similar observation instruments manufactured by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. The famous British biochemist Dr. Joseph Needham once commented: “Guo Shoujing’s approach was a very early pioneer for the equatorial mounts widely used in modern telescopes; it will become an indelible milestone in the history of human scientific and cultural development.”
Seven hundred years after the era of Guo Shoujing’s astronomy passed, Academicians Wang Shouguan and Su Dingqiang recognized that Chinese astronomy should target large-scale spectroscopic observations as a breakthrough point. A brand-new “sky-surveying” telescope emerged: In August 2008, LAMOST completed all construction tasks. The project is divided into eight subsystems: optics, active optics and mirror support, mount and tracking device, telescope control, focal plane instruments, dome, observation control and data processing, and input catalog and survey strategy.
“LAMOST is the abbreviation for The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope. The LAMOST telescope is located at the Xinglong Observatory of the National Astronomical Observatories.”
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