A few years ago (in fact in 2006) I considered the issue of how the support for astronomy in any country depends on its economy. It’s an interesting question, but the problem is how to measure an index of astronomical vitality in a country.

The very simplest and crudest measure is just to count the number of International Astronomical Union (IAU) members present in any country. The IAU is recognized as the main international organization for professional astronomers.

One of the highlights of my visit to Spain has been a recent visit to el Real Instituto y Observatorio de la Armada, or in English, the Royal Naval Observatory in San Fernando near Cádiz. I spent a week working in the magnificent library there at the end of June.

Real Observatorio de la Armada at San Fernando. The building dates from 1798 and houses the library and historical archives. Francisco Gonzalez is standing on the steps in front of the building.

First some history: el Real Observatorio de la Armada, or ROA for short, was founded in 1753 in Cádiz. In 1798 it moved to a far superior site in San Fernando, some 8 km from central Cádiz. For those who know the topography of the area, Cádiz is built on an island on Spain’s Atlantic coast, and connected to the mainland by a long and narrow sandspit. Essentially the city is fully built out and land is at a premium. San Fernando is also an island of sorts (la Isla de León) but a narrow channel separates it from the mainland proper.

This article discusses two classical papers in the history of astronomy, namely Christian Doppler’s (1803–53) announcement in May 1842 of the effect named after him, and a major article by Hermann Carl Vogel (1841–1907), which appeared in May 1892. Vogel’s work represented the first successful application of the Doppler effect to stars, to determine their space velocities in the line of sight.

Doppler’s theoretical paper and Vogel’s painstaking instrumental technique have together provided the basis for our knowledge not only of stellar motions, but have also indirectly contributed to our knowledge of stellar rotation, of thermal and turbulent Doppler line broadening in stellar (and other) spectra, of stellar masses in many binary stars, of galaxy masses from their rotation or velocity dispersion, of the missing mass problem in galaxies and clusters, of the expansion of the universe, of the nature of quasi-stellar objects and of the existence of the Big Bang. Indeed astronomical knowledge would almost certainly be vastly poorer if Doppler’s principle had never been applied in astronomy.

During the second week of June, I travelled from Prague to the Czech Republic’s second city of Brno, some 200 km to the south-east of Prague in the province of Moravia. The purpose was to participate in a conference named BinKey – on binary stars as a key to the comprehension of the universe. The meeting attracted over 150 participants from many parts of the world, but predominantly from eastern and central Europe, countries which 20 years ago were behind the Iron Curtain, but now transformed into thriving free economies. I met no-one from these eastern European countries who didn’t agree that life, and especially scientific life, was not now much better than it was two decades earlier, in spite of the many current economic problems that we all face.

In Zelny Trh, a square in central Brno

Prague ranks as one of my favourite European cities, so it was wonderful to be invited back to stay a week there and to give some seminars. My host was Dr Attila Mészáros at the Astronomical Institute of Charles University. Attila visited New Zealand two years ago when he came to a conference and stayed at our university. So it was good to have a reciprocal visit.

Dr Attila Meszaros, astronomer at Charles University, Prague