The History Of Ptolemy S Star Catalogue

Ptolemy's Almagest shares with Euclid's Elements the glory of being the scientific text longest in use. From its conception in the second century up to the late Renaissance, this work determined astronomy as a science. During this time the Almagest was not only a work on astronomy; the subject was defined as what is described in the Almagest. The cautious emancipation of the late middle ages and the revolutionary creation of the new science in the 16th century are not conceivable without reference to the Almagest. This text lifted European astronomy to the high standard of knowledge on which the new science flourished. Before, the Ptolemaic models of the orbits of the sun, the moon, and the planets had been refined by Arabic astronomers. They provided the structural elements with which Copernicus and Kepler ushered in the era of modern astronomy. The Almagest survived the destruction of its epicyclic representation of the planetary orbits in the conceptual traces left behind in the theories of its successors. The clear separation of the sidereal from the tropical year, the celestial coordinate systems, the concepts of time, the forms of the constellations, and brightness classifications of celestial objects are, among many other things, still part of the astronomical canon even today.

Ptolemy's Almagest is one of the most influential scientific works in history. A masterpiece of technical exposition, it was the basic textbook of astronomy for more than a thousand years, and still is the main source for our knowledge of ancient astronomy. This translation, based on the standard Greek text of Heiberg, makes the work accessible to English readers in an intelligible and reliable form. It contains numerous corrections derived from medieval Arabic translations and extensive footnotes that take account of the great progress in understanding the work made in this century, due to the discovery of Babylonian records and other researches. It is designed to stand by itself as an interpretation of the original, but it will also be useful as an aid to reading the Greek text.

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This easy-to-follow book offers a statistico-geometrical approach for dating ancient star catalogs. The authors' scientific methods reveal statistical properties of ancient catalogs and overcome the difficulties of their dating originated by the low accuracy of these catalogs. Methods are tested on reliably dated medieval star catalogs and applied to the star catalog of the Almagest. Here, the dating of Ptolemy's famous star catalog is reconsidered and recalculated using modern mathematical techniques.The text provides necessary information from astronomy and astrometry. It also covers the history of observational equipment and methods for measuring coordinates of stars. Many chapters are devoted to the Almagest, from a preliminary analysis to a global statistical processing of the catalog and its basic parts. Mathematics are simplified in this book for easy reading. This book will prove invaluable for mathematicians, astronomers, astrophysicists, specialists in natural sciences, historians interested in mathematical and statistical methods, and second-year mathematics students.Features:

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