BEYOND PRECISION: ASTRONOMY IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY.

The long nineteenth century--the period from the end of the French Revolution to the start of World War I--saw huge transformations in the body of astronomical knowledge and what astronomers regarded as the boundaries and limits of legitimate astronomy. These changes resulted from the complex interplay of scientific, technical, social, political and cultural factors. In this paper, I will examine three features of astronomy in the long nineteenth century. These features are 1) the drive for precision in the first half of the nineteenth century; 2) the range of activities undertaken in official observatories; and 3) the emergence of astrophysics in the second half of the century and how it was shaped in the United States by a new form of astronomical patronage. For each of these features, we will see that astronomers played different roles beyond that of astronomers narrowly defined and that these roles illuminate major aspects of nineteenth-century astronomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]