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A volvelle from a sixteenth-century edition of Sacrobosco's De Sphaera. De sphaera mundi (Latin title meaning On the Sphere of the World, sometimes rendered The Sphere of the Cosmos; the Latin title is also given as Tractatus de sphaera, Textus de sphaera, or simply De sphaera) is a medieval introduction to the basic elements of astronomy written by Johannes de Sacrobosco (John of Holywood) c ...
Two pages from the Ratdolt edition of the De astronomia showing woodcuts of the constellations Cassiopeia and Andromeda.Courtesy of the US Naval Observatory Library. De astronomia (Latin: [deː äs̠t̪rɔˈnɔmiä]; Concerning Astronomy) [nb 1] is a book of stories written in Latin, probably during the reign of Augustus (c. 27 BC – AD 14).
The "sphere" Sacrobosco was referring to is the celestial sphere – an imaginary backdrop of the stars in the sky – which was the meaning of the word mundi ("world") at that time, not the planet Earth. Though principally about astronomy, in its first chapter the book also contains a clear description of the Earth as a sphere.
Book III describes his work on the precession of the equinoxes and treats the apparent movements of the Sun and related phenomena. Book IV is a similar description of the Moon and its orbital movements. Book V explains how to calculate the positions of the wandering stars based on the heliocentric model and gives tables for the five planets.
Book XIII covers motion in latitude, that is, the deviation of planets from the ecliptic. The final topic of this chapter also covers how to determine when a planet first becomes visible after being hidden by the glare of the sun, as well as the last time it is seen before being hidden by the sun's glare.
The Toledan Tables were updated in the 1270s by the Alfonsine tables, which were produced at Toledo, in Spanish and Latin, from the original tables of two centuries earlier. [8] The descendants of the Toledan Tables, as updated with some corrections, were the most widely used astronomy tables in late medieval Latin astronomy.
The book also provides some cursory details about astronomy at the knowledge level of the end of the 19th century. Similarly, astrology and its history are dealt with briefly in the introduction, and some other basic astrological references are scattered throughout the book, although downplayed.
Astronomia nova (English: New Astronomy, full title in original Latin: Astronomia Nova ΑΙΤΙΟΛΟΓΗΤΟΣ seu physica coelestis, tradita commentariis de motibus stellae Martis ex observationibus G.V. Tychonis Brahe) [1] [2] is a book, published in 1609, that contains the results of the astronomer Johannes Kepler's ten-year-long investigation of the motion of Mars.