The Ursine Rose, or the Sun

...themselves are not lacking in praise for their industry, even though such observations are not of the sort from which the courses of the Maculae spots could be deduced as full and perfect. It is impossible to obtain these unless the horizontal contacts are recorded most exactly; for when these are lacking, the true locations and motions of these solar bodies are proclaimed in vain. And without mathematical certainty, they are merely added to the Catalog of circumsolar Planeta planets by some arbitrary persuasion.

I would have much preferred that there had also been at hand those things which P. Ioannes Baptista Cysatus and Pater Chrysostomus Gall accurately recorded and observed at Ingolstadium Ingolstadt; for their strenuous labors, endured for my sake over many years, deserved this. I shall not neglect them in later efforts, God willing, but will bring them forth with interest. From those records, along with my own observations from those times, I shall winnow out the designations of others that I keep collected in Germania Germany, and I will correct the frivolous consequences and false doctrine derived from them—not by my own whim or the impulse of the rash mob, but shown more clearly and richly than I provide in this Work, by the Sun itself (which is what a true Mathematician must do). For ever since my Apelles Scheiner's pseudonym in earlier publications hid behind his painting, or Ulysses behind the shield of Ajax, not a few have emerged who, taking up a brush in their hands instead of an awl, have infected the work with their incompetence as they sought to finish another's painting. Others have attacked the solar phenomenon like the most chaste Penelope in the absence of Ulysses, pestering it with strange artifices, while everyone labors to snatch this bride for himself and lead her to his own home, thinking it beautiful to illuminate himself with SOLAR DARKNESS and to decorate himself with CELESTIAL SPOTS. The result is that the reader, ignorant of historical truth, may rightly hesitate, and can by no means easily discern to whom, in such a crowd of rivals, he should adjudge this elegant Helen. For there are those who favor this one or that out of ambition and hatred, some out of zeal for their own fatherlands and Nations, some out of a feeling of friendship, some out of mere persuasion and authority alone, and some led by error. Finally, there are those who, conquered by the truth, conclude what is just. So that I may shine a certain torch of truth for all of them, I candidly append a brief, simple, and uncorrupted summary of the events concerning the discovery of this phenomenon (beyond those things which are said copiously in Book 1, Chapter 2, and Book 3 in the general Notes, Note 28, and elsewhere in the Notes to the Appendix of the Observations, plate XXVI, page 222 and following, as well as in other places).

Therefore, in the year 1611, as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Ingolstadt, in the month of March, I climbed the tower of our church. Having directed the Helioscope at the Sun, which was proportionately dimmed by a moderate mist, I discovered the solar spots for the first time—not led by any prior rumor, but by a spontaneous zeal for exploring the Sun—with my associate Io. Baptista Cysatus, then a student of Theology, who from that time vehemently urged me to prepare colored lenses. While I was doing this, in the month of October of the same year, some days arrived again in their own manner, sprinkled with tempered mists. As these invited me to observe the Sun, I directed the optical tube toward it from my own room (as you have it expressed in Book 1, page 63, from the table of Apelles), namely on the 21st day, at the 21st hour by the German method—or 9 in the morning by the post-midnight method. I saw the spots in it for the second time, and showed them to many other Fathers and students until the 10th hour. Around that same time, P. Adamus Tanner obtained his first sight of the same spots from his own room (which he himself recounts in Volume 1, Disputation 6, on the Creation of the World, Question 3, Section 5, on solar spots, number 69), as he says, by I know not what prior rumor, though not even the slightest whisper of it reached my ears before the spots were first seen by me. For I had not yet divulged that first observation of mine up to that time. From this day on, however, I continuously used the blue tubes prepared for this purpose, and immediately devised other methods of observing, by projection and by reflection, and above all...