We don’t have any sites directly associated with the European monk, astronomer, astrologer, mathematician and general polymath Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543), of course, but the University of Sydney does have a very rare 1566 edition of his famous book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres).
Publication of the first edition of De revolutionibus in 1543 reintroduced the concept of heliocentrism to Europe and precipitated what is now remembered as the Copernican Revolution.
Second edition of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium printed by Heinrich Petri (1508–1579), in Basel, Switzerland, in 1566.
You can visit the 1566 edition of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium at Sydney University’s Fisher Library here, or read a digital version here.
You can also watch a video of the recent restoration of Fisher Library’s copy here.
Credits: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=435360
Nicolas Copernicus’s contribution to our understanding of our solar system has been acknowledged and memorialised in many different ways. At the Siding Spring Observatory, near the IAT town of Coonabarabran, for example, Poland’s Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center installed and operates its Solaris 3 Telescope, a 20 inch Ritchey Chretien system, to search for planets around eclipsing binary stars
The European Union’s Space Programme also named its Earth Observation component for Copernicus. A cluster of Copernicus Sentinel satellites now orbit Planet Earth as the EU’s ‘Eyes in the Sky‘ to monitor changes to our land, waters and atmosphere. These satellites collect data on global sea water surface temperatures, methane emissions, oil spills, melting icebergs, atmospheric water vapour, and bushfires, for example. Data from these satellites has confirmed that 2024 was Earth’s warmest year on record, and that our planet’s average temperature would exceed 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial average, the benchmark set by the Paris Agreement in December 2015. (See
All the Copernicus Programmes‘ Sentinel satellite data is freely available through the Copernicus Australasia Regional Data Hub (the Hub), an Australian government entity. You can see how this data has been used in Australia here.
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Where to find Sydney University’s Fisher Library.
Post published 5 December 2024. Last updated 28 April 2025.
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