Sky & Telescope - December 2023 - 26

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE WILLIAM SHEEHAN COLLECTION
UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED
OBSERVING HISTORY by William Sheehan
E. M. Antoniadi
The Astronomer Who
Decoded Mars
This Greek-French astronomer is perhaps history's
greatest visual planetary observer.
E
ugène Michel Antoniadi is one of the most famous
of all planetary astronomers. Known for his artistic,
highly detailed, and accurate drawings of Mars, he's
also remembered for his battle with Percival Lowell over the
so-called Martian canals. However, despite his fame, Antoniadi's
life story is relatively little known.
How did this man from the remote capital
of the dying Ottoman Empire become such
a skilled observer and rise in prominence to
challenge the authority of one of the era's
most celebrated astronomers?
Coming of Age in Tatavla
E. M. Antoniadi was born on March 1, 1870,
in the Tatavla quarter of Constantinople
(present-day Istanbul, Türkiye). His parents
were wealthy merchants, and growing up,
Antoniadi wanted for little.
Astronomy during the Ottoman period
had reached its heyday centuries earlier
when, in 1421, the Timurid sultan Ulugh Beg established the
great observatory at Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan.
However, scientific progress slowed badly in the centuries
that followed - so much so that the Copernican theory was
not officially recognized in the Ottoman Empire until early
in the 19th century. Thankfully, there was an accumulated
legacy of astronomical literature available in Greek, French,
and English, which Antoniadi, who was fluent in all three
languages, must have devoured.
In addition to receiving an excellent education, Antoniadi
seems to have been something of a savant, with exceptional
powers of concentration and a compulsion to focus
26 DECEMBER 2023 * SKY & TELESCOPE
obsessively on whatever captivated him, even at
the exclusion of pursuits he embraced with passionate
intensity at other times. He was interested in
how things work and in extracting the underlying rules
that govern the behavior of systems, whether in astronomy
or works of architecture. In people, not so
much. In addition, he seems to have had a
nearly photographic memory, which enabled
him to render a landscape from memory
after seeing it once - something that would
later stand him in good stead when he began
to draw Mars.
Antoniadi's tendency to withdraw into
intense but solitary interests was enhanced
by the distressing social and political
circumstances of his youth. By the mid19th
century, the Ottoman Empire was
already being referred to as " the sick man
of Europe " as it charted an inevitable path
through despotism to terminal decline and
finally extinction. A significant catalyst was the RussoTurkish
War of 1877-78, leaving the Empire with huge
reparations to pay the victors, which wreaked havoc with
its finances. Although Antoniadi was relatively unaffected
in Tatavla, he must have begun to strategize an escape to
Europe and, in particular, to France.
The rising tensions that would lead to the First World
War were only good for one industry: arms manufacturing.
SAILING TO TOTALITY Antoniadi was Director of the British Astronomical
Association's Mars Section when, in 1896, he boarded the
Norse King with the Association's first-ever eclipse expedition to Norway.
Unfortunately, the sky was cloudy on the day of the eclipse.
Sky & Telescope - December 2023

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