Sidereus Nuncius: the Moon

Edition

Excerpt: the whole account of the Moon, from “De facie autem Lunae” (fol. 7r, last line) to “confirmabimus.” (fol. 16r), the sections before (dedication, the telescope) and after (fixed stars, Milky Way, Medicean planets) are left out. Text transcribed from the scan of the first edition (Venice, Tommaso Baglioni, 1610) in the Smithsonian Libraries (Dibner Library, archive.org Sidereusnuncius00Gali, leaves 17 to 35). The transcription started from the text of the Edizione Nazionale (Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, vol. III part 1, ed. Antonio Favaro, Florence, Barbera, 1892, pp. 62-75, la.wikisource Pagina:Le opere di Galileo Galilei III.djvu/63 to 76, proofread), which normalizes spelling and punctuation; every word was then read against the page images and set back to the 1610 print: its spelling (v and u, ij, æ, œ, e caudata, “Emisphærium”, “coors”, “Boemiæ”, “Sistemate”, “Eclypsibus”, “miliaria”, “orror”, “estuosi”, “uicinas”), its accents (à, verò, quàm, nempè...), its “&”, its capitals, its punctuation and its word division (“hincindè”, “non ne”, “se se”, “indies”, “immodum”, “præseferunt”, “proculdubio”). Where the print and Favaro differ in wording, the print is followed: “hora” twice for “ora”, “prominente” for “prominent”, “Ciati” for “Gyathi”, “cauda” for “caudæ”, “demonstrabimus” for “demonstrationibus”, “quadratum” for “quadraturam”, “istæ” for “iste”, “sphære” for “sphæræ”, “inibere” for “inhibere”, “exurgere”, “exibet”, “quinimo”; “mihi” corrects “mibi” of the Wikisource transcription. Misprints of the print are kept: “immimuuntur”, “nuncunpantur”, “commostrant”, “quæda” (a tilde is not visible in either copy checked). “obtegere” is read in the copy of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (archive.org ita-bnc-pos-0000056-001, same setting), where the Smithsonian copy shows “obregere” from a weakly inked t. Normalizations: long s set as s; the ct, st, ss and other ligatures set as separate letters; abbreviations expanded (quidẽ, nõ twice, mõtium, cernũtur, superficiẽ, splendidiorẽ, vmbrarũ, etiã, cũ, verticẽ, elatũ, remotũ, coniunctionẽ, cõtactu, aspectũ, nunquã, locũ, terrestrẽ, nullũ, quidpiã, ẽt as etiam, vndosamq;, ijq;, cumq;); line-end hyphens rejoined; running heads, folio numbers, signatures and catchwords left out. The five etchings of the Moon (fols. 8r, 9v, 10r, 10v twice) are set side by side above the text, cropped at their plate marks, converted to grayscale and their paper tone leveled to white; the two diagrams (fols. 12v and 13v) are cropped and leveled the same way and placed where the print has them, which splits the paragraph at the same point as the print.

Rights

Galileo Galilei died on 8 January 1642 and the book was published in 1610: the text and its etchings are in the public domain in France and in the United States. The scan used for the text and the images is marked “Not in copyright” (possible-copyright-status) on its Internet Archive item, Sidereusnuncius00Gali, digitized by the Smithsonian Libraries.

The copy of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (archive.org ita-bnc-pos-0000056-001), whose images carry a ProQuest copyright notice, was only read for checking; none of its images is reproduced.