Chronicles
''Longitude of the Specola of Naples to the east of that of Paris 47.44,3
Mr. Barone De Zach... taking an average between several results for the latitude of the palace of the Royal Museum of Naples,... found it of 47'.41”,2: from this, applying the appropriate reduction to it, comes 47'.42”,5 for the longitude of the Specola.
In November 1819, the works of the Specola Reale of Naples in Miradois were completed. The director,
Carlo Brioschi, could transport the crates with astronomical instrumentation from the San Gaudioso Observatory and be able to make the first test observations.
The specula of San Gaudioso was thus destined as an astronomical-nautical observatory of the Navy Academy;
It served for the instruction of the naval officers, and there it was necessary to preserve and regulate the instruments of warships and merchant ships. The direction was entrusted to Giuseppe Pilati, a student of Father Piazzi and
professor of astronomy in the college of the marine guards in Naples.
In Pizzofalcone in a royal building, the
Topographic Office of the Kingdom of Naples was established by decree of
Giuseppe Bonaparte of 8 June 1808 entrusting its direction to the old Paduan geographer
Giovanni Antonio Rizzi-Zannoni who since 1781 was working on the drafting of the "Geographic Atlas of the Kingdom".
He holds a cabinet of instruments and machines for all his internal and campaign work and an observatory with a professor of astronomy and geodesy.
The three public observatories, the
Ancient, and now abolished observatory at the University Palace and the specola of the
Palazzo di S. A. R. the Prince. Leopold, the former palace of Acton were the significant sites of the city for latitude measurements.
In Capodimonte Carlo Brioschi and the astronomers
Ernesto Capocci and
Antonio Nobile took place between 17 December 1819 and 31 December 1820 the first measurements of the stars and Sun.
In 1819, they observed:
Polare - χ Dra - γ Cas - δ Cas - δ UMi - Spica - ε UMi - β Dra - α Lyr - α Aql - δ Dra - α Cyg - β Cas - Sirio - ε UMa - α UMa - ζ UMa; UMa - η Her - η Oph - ϑ Oph - δ Aur - ο Her - χ Lyr - β Lyr - ζ Sgr - Antares - β UMi - η UMa - Arturo - α Cep
In 1821 the first meteorological observations.
In the Miradois specula, in addition to carrying out astronomical research and observations, there was a meteorological station, continuing, so the publications of the bulletins on the daily measurements of temperature, pressure, air humidity, and wind direction that began already in the specula of San Gaudioso.
the observations of the important annular eclipse of the sun that occurred on 7 September 1820, with the results of the same deduce
In 1877 a
Meteorological observatory was built in the northern part of the house of the astronomers
In 1879,
two masonry stations and a wooden pavilion were built for the
Magnetic Observatory to determine the variations of the components of the Earth's magnetic field.
Ernesto Capocci, nephew of
Federico Zuccari, appointed in 1819 by
Giuseppe Piazzi as an assistant astronomer, dedicated himself to observations of comets. He soon acquired international fame so much so that he was defined by Baron
von Zack as
the Encke of Italy. In 1827, on the proposal of
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, the
Berlin Academy of Sciences offered him to participate in the compilation of the celestial map. To Capocci and
Leopoldo Del Re, in Naples, and to father
Giovanni Inghirami of the
Ximenian Observatory of Florence was entrusted with
hora XVIII, where it is the maximum part of the Milky Way about that area. The observations began in April 1827, and after their work, Capocci and del Re measured, using the
meridian circle and the
equatorial telescope, the positions of about 7900 stars and found the relative position of a few hundred double stars. The work of the Neapolitan astronomers led
Johann Franz Encke to write:
Among the papers we have received so far, it seems that yours is the one that gives the best image faithful to the part of the sky it represents.
In 1833, after Brioschi's death, Capocci was appointed as director of the Observatory, a position he held until 1850 when he was dismissed for having participated together with his sons in the liberal uprisings of 1848. The office was held by Leopoldo del Re. With the fall of the Bourbon kingdom, in 1860, Capocci was reinstated in the office until 1864, the year of his death.
In 1836 the direction of the observatory passed;
interim to Leopoldo Del Re. Capocci leaves on a delegation with the king and part of the government of the Two Sicilies to Paris to study the new technologies used in the French capital and to purchase new instruments for the Observatory. Capocci's European journey continued towards Brussels and London. Returning to Naples in 1839 he hired new staff to increase astronomical research, calling
Michele Rinonapoli,
Annibale de Gasparis,
Remigio Del Grosso and the Danish
Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters.
During the direction of Leopoldo Del Re, who was chronologically the last of the age pre-unification, the personality had emerged prominent by Annibale de Gasparis. Director from 1864 to 1889, after having refused to take over from Capocci in 1850, De Gasparis was the major protagonist of astronomical science at the Specola of Capodimonte in the 1960s-1990s. The post-unification years were difficult, with few funds available and an inadequate set of tools. The Neapolitan Specola, initially equipped with cutting-edge astronomical machines for observations, was already at the beginning of 1850 had shown that he had outdated equipment. Despite De Gasparis, he was very busy in research on celestial mechanics which led him in 1849 to discover
Igea Borbonica the first of 9 planets, receiving the recognition of the most prestigious astronomers of the time and, in 1851, the gold medal of the
Royal Astronomical Society and the title of Knight of the Order of the Red Eagle from the Kaiser
Frederick William of Prussia.
The other activities of research followed by the astronomers of Capodimonte continued to move along the classical lines of positional astronomy and responded to the "practical and daily" vocation of the typical nineteenth-century Observatory: measurement and regulation of "civil" time, i.e. the indication of the exact time, and meteorological surveys. This is because the scientific-astronomical culture in Naples remained linked for a long time to a tradition of mathematical studies, while in other European states, the strong interchange between different disciplines such as mathematics, chemistry, and physics led to the birth of
Astronomia Nova, astrophysics.
Extremely slowly and overcoming many difficulties, the Specola of Capodimonte entered the circuit of international works solely thanks to the brilliant intuition of some prominent men. This is the case of
Arminio Nobile, who in 1855 was the first to hypothesize variations in latitude short period, a phenomenon that thirty years later the astronomer of the Berlin Observatory
Küstner " rediscovered", taking credit for it. Following this episode, Nobile published in 1891 an essay entitled
On a Claim of Property scientific. He worked in close collaboration with
Faustino Brioschi,
Francesco Contarino and
Filippo Angelitti, all protagonists of astronomical research in Naples at the end of the century.
Between 1893 and 1894 the director
Emanuele Fergola performed a series of daily observations simultaneously with the
Columbia College Observatory in New York, to determine the variation in latitude at Naples. Although his background was purely mathematical, Fergola was interested in astronomy starting from the 1960s, collaborating with father
Angelo Secchi of
Collegio Romano to measure the difference in longitude between Naples and Rome: On this occasion, the telegraph was used for the first time in Italy for the synchronic transmission of data.
Fergola was also responsible for the first hypotheses on the existence of the motion of the Pole.
This remained the orientation of astronomical studies in Naples until 1912 when the director of the observatory became
Azeglio Bemporad. Convinced that the future of astronomical studies lay in
investigations into the properties of physics of the stars, Bemporad had to struggle quite a bit against the Neapolitan academic circles still tied to the traditional studies of positional astronomy. On the threshold of the First World War, the Neapolitan Specola was taking his first steps in the astrophysics sector by participating in the compilation of the
Astrophotographic Catalog of Catania.
The war and then the difficult recovery marked a setback in investments which led to a progressive aging of the structures and impoverishment of human and instrumental resources. In 1926, Bemporad had to recognize that making the Observatory work with the instruments he had at his disposal was a difficult, if not desperate, undertaking and that the competition from European and American structures was now very considerable. The Capodimonte Observatory was one of the first in all of Italy, indeed one of the first in Europe... in the first decade of its foundation, that is, just a century ago... Now, due to the potential of telescopes, the Neapolitan Observatory it is precisely the last of the ten Observatories that Italy boasts.
[The observatory] still maintains the pride of its location being extremely favorable for classical astronomy observations, but as for the potential of tools remains
In 1932 Bemporad abandoned the directorship to closely follow the Catania catalog project and the Julian astronomer was called to direct the Naples observatory Luigi Carnera. A staunch defender of positional astronomy considered superior to theoretical astronomy and astrophysics, Carnera attempted a total renovation of the Neapolitan observatory imagining its transformation into an astrometric observatory. Astrometry has not lost the reason for its existence in the slightest, there is currently no observatory in Italy dedicated to it, so a renewal of the Neapolitan observatory made with the criterion of serving that branch of research would be of great value. maximum interest in science, without creating duplicates, or interfering with the studies of the sister specimens. Carnera, in the project he had the architect Alberto Sanarica carry out, imagined establishing Naples as the only city in Italy which includes among the chairs and cabinets of its University those of three related subjects: astronomy, geodesy and geophysics, a scientific center that would have combined the astronomical observatory, on the Miradois hill, with the institutes of terrestrial physics and geodesy. The project did not receive the approval of the ministry and the system designed by Carnera succeeded only in the construction of the pavilions for the Repsold's meridian circle and the Bamberg passages instrument.
In 1943 the observatory was occupied by the American command, installing a radar base for air control.
The post-war period was very difficult and little changed in the scientific orientations of the Capodimonte astronomers.
In 1952
Attilio Colacevich introduced the first photoelectric photometer in Italian astronomy. Some small stellar photometry programs were defined, the first steps that could have introduced the Naples observatory into the vast fields of astrophysical research,
but that threshold was not crossed.
Only under the direction of Mario Rigutti, from 1969, and then of Massimo Capaccioli did the Capodimonte Observatory manage to find the right impetus to
transform the ancient, glorious and, unfortunately, very badly damaged observatory into a modern institution. A new generation of astronomers was involved in modern research programs and with important international collaborations.
The beginning of the second half was very hard and difficult; ... and, obviously, ... not everyone reacted positively to the new proposals.
In 1970, four astronomers worked in the observatory, and a few years the
solar physics research groups were formed, engaged in the study of the photosphere and chromosphere of the Sun, and
stellar physics, directed towards the study of binary star systems and pre- and post-main sequence stars. Subsequently, activities of research in the field of
extragalactic physics, following studies on the dynamics of elliptical and lenticular galaxies, first, and subsequently also on the kinematic properties of galaxies.
In collaboration with the then Naval University Institute, today
University of Naples Parthenope, the laboratory of
cosmic physics and planetology for the study of cometary and planetary dust and the creation of instrumentation on board space missions.
The
technology group specialized significantly in designing and constructing the
VST, a 2,6m telescope installed in the Atacama desert in Chile on the site of the
ESO for wide-field deep-sky observation.
Having joined the
National Institute of Astrophysics in 2002, the Capodimonte Astronomical Observatory is today among the most active and prestigious international institutes in all lines of modern astrophysics research from the ground and space.