7 gennaio

Three “little stars” in a line beside Jupiter, which moved from night to night; by 13 January there were four. Here were bodies that did not circle the Earth. Galileo named them the Medicean Stars.

Through his new telescope he saw three small “stars” in a line beside Jupiter. Within a week he had found a fourth and realized they circled Jupiter, not the Earth. He published in Sidereus Nuncius that March.

Three small “stars” in a line beside Jupiter, which changed places from night to night; on 13 January there were four. Two of Galileo’s own telescopes survive in Florence’s Museo Galileo: tubes a metre or so long, magnifying about 14 and 20 times, with a field of view smaller than the Moon.

The Nemesis, an iron steamship the Company had ordered from Laird’s of Birkenhead in secret, sailed into the shallows where no warship could follow and blew up a war junk with a rocket. It was the first iron warship to go round the Cape of Good Hope.

An old French crane boat, left over from the first attempt, became the first vessel to cross from ocean to ocean through the canal, unofficially, as part of the finishing work.

Five Citroën cars on Kégresse caterpillar tracks, led by Georges-Marie Haardt and Louis Audouin-Dubreuil, made the first crossing of the Sahara by motor vehicle, from Touggourt in Algeria to Timbuktu. It was a publicity stunt and a colonial project: France wanted motor links between its North and…

Operation Typhoon brought German spearheads within sight of the city in the frosts of late November. On 5 December Zhukov counter-attacked with divisions brought from Siberia: the first great German defeat of the war.

Japan’s first interplanetary spacecraft, sent to watch Halley’s Comet from afar. Its sister Suisei followed in August. Japan joined the Soviet Union and the United States as the only countries to have sent a probe beyond the Moon.