Ancient Indian Astronomy and Contributions of Samanta Chandra Sekhar

Book excerpt: Samanta Chandra Sekhar (1835-1904) occupies a special position in Ancient Indian Astronomy, being the last link in a long chain of illustrious astronomers commencing with Aryabhata (5th century AD). The book describes how he identified errors accumulated over the ages, eradicated them and brought the subject to final perfection. The discovery of the three anomalies in the motion of the moon, hiking of the Earth-Sun distance by more than ten times the value taken by his predecessors and his novel planetary model with heliocentric motion of the planets are some of his major contributions. How astronomy developed in ancient civilizations of the world, and the frontier topics in astrophysics like Dark Matter etc. discussed in a few articles help in developing an integral perspective of the reader.