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For the Moon, Ptolemy began with Hipparchus' epicycle-on-deferent, then added a device that historians of astronomy refer to as a "crank mechanism": [28] he succeeded in creating models for the other planets, where Hipparchus had failed, by introducing a third device called the equant. Ptolemy wrote the Syntaxis as a textbook of mathematical ...
Ptolemy states that having dealt with the former subject (astronomy) in its own treatise, he "shall now give an account of the second and less self-sufficient method in a properly philosophical way, so that one whose aim is the truth might never compare its perceptions with the sureness of the first". [27]
Ptolemy's Handy Tables (Ancient Greek: πρόχειροι κανόνες, romanized: Procheiroi kanones) is a collection of astronomical tables that second century astronomer Ptolemy created after finishing the Almagest. The Handy Tables elaborated the astronomical tables of the Almagest and included usage instructions, but left out the ...
The book was thoroughly illustrated along with observations and descriptions of the stars, their positions (copied from Ptolemy's Almagest with the longitudes increased by 12° 42' to account for the precession), their magnitudes (brightness) and their color. Notably, al-Sufi improved upon Ptolemy's system for measuring star brightness.
In classical, medieval, and Renaissance astronomy, the Primum Mobile (Latin: "first movable") was the outermost moving sphere in the geocentric model of the universe. [ 1 ] The concept was introduced by Ptolemy to account for the apparent daily motion of the heavens around the Earth, producing the east-to-west rising and setting of the sun and ...
Ptolemy's Almagest (originally titled The Mathematical Syntaxis) is one of the most influential books in the history of Western astronomy. In this book, Ptolemy explained how to predict the behavior of the planets with the introduction of a new mathematical idea, the equant .
Newton was known for his book The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy (1977). In Newton's view, Ptolemy was "the most successful fraud in the history of science". Newton claimed that Ptolemy had predominantly obtained the astronomical results described in his work The Almagest by computation, and not by the direct observations that Ptolemy described.
Book 2 provides the basic results that one can arrive at with a spherical astronomy. Book 3 provides a theory of the sun. Book 4 provides an equivalent treatment for the moon. Book 5 deals with the new complications that arise from applying Ptolemy's theory to the moon, as opposed to the simpler case of the sun.