The first issue of The Astronomical Journal (AJ) was published 175 years ago this month. This remarkable history means that the journal has persisted through the American Civil War and both World Wars, through 35 presidential administrations, and even through the development of “astronomer” as a profession in North America — it wasn’t until 50 years after the AJ’s launch that the continent founded its first professional society of astronomers, the American Astronomical Society.
As the first astronomy-focused academic journal to be published outside of Europe, the AJ has come a long way: its first issue — containing just a single printed article (“Development of the Perturbative Function of Planetary Motion”) — would have had limited circulation among the small but growing community of North Americans interested in astronomy. Now, as a fully open-access electronic journal, the AJ garners more than 100,000 views per year.
Early issues of the journal presented major advances in solar system and stellar science, laying the groundwork for modern discoveries in these fields. In the pages of the AJ, you can find foundational work establishing the ubiquity of black holes in the centers of galaxies, an examination of the iconic Hubble Deep Field, and Nobel-prize-winning evidence for the accelerating expansion of the universe, to name just a few works. Today, impactful observational results can be found alongside major advances in instrumentation, surveys, and software, such as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and the astropy codebase.
To celebrate this remarkable milestone, we invite you to join us in looking back on the journal’s history using this interactive timeline. Here’s to 175 more years!
