• Publications of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.21-34
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• 2016

There were two books on astronomy published in 1908. One is "Astronomy (天文學)" written by Jeong, Yeong-Taek (鄭永澤, 1874 ~ 1948), an educator. The other is "Introduction to Astronomy(텬문략 )" written by William Martyn Baird (裵偉良, 1862 ~ 1931), an American missionary. It was known that these two books were translated into Korean as astronomical textbooks of the Korean Empire. We investigated the life of translators, the motivation of writing textbook, and the translators' specialty in astronomy. We also compared the two books in terms of content, orthography of terminology, scale of units, and so forth. We suggest that these books were really utilized as textbooks of astronomy in the modern school in the early $20^{th}$ century in Korea. We also conclude that in astronomy education these two textbooks bridged the gap between the traditional Chinese astronomy of the middle age and modern astronomy from the West.