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Book XII covers stations and retrograde motion, which occurs when planets appear to pause, then briefly reverse their motion against the background of the zodiac. Ptolemy understood these terms to apply to Mercury and Venus as well as the outer planets. Book XIII covers motion in latitude, that is, the deviation of planets from the ecliptic ...
Opening chapter of the first printed edition of Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, transcribed into Greek and Latin by Joachim Camerarius (Nuremberg, 1535).. The commonly known Greek and Latin titles (Tetrabiblos and Quadripartitum respectively), meaning 'four books', are traditional nicknames [24] for a work which in some Greek manuscripts is entitled Μαθηματικὴ τετράβιβλος ...
Gerald James Toomer (born 23 November 1934) is a historian of astronomy and mathematics who has written numerous books and papers on ancient Greek and medieval Islamic astronomy. In particular, he translated Ptolemy 's Almagest into English.
The angular rate at which the epicycle traveled was not constant unless he measured it from another point which is now called the equant (Ptolemy did not give it a name). It was the angular rate at which the deferent moved around the point midway between the equant and the Earth (the eccentric) that was constant; the epicycle center swept out ...
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.
In Almagest V, 11, Ptolemy writes: . Now Hipparchus made such an examination principally from the sun. Since from other properties of the sun and moon (of which a study will be made below) it follows that if the distance of one of the two luminaries is given, the distance of the other is also given, he tries by conjecturing the distance of the sun to demonstrate the distance of the moon.
In Greek antiquity the ideas of celestial spheres and rings first appeared in the cosmology of Anaximander in the early 6th century BC. [7] In his cosmology both the Sun and Moon are circular open vents in tubular rings of fire enclosed in tubes of condensed air; these rings constitute the rims of rotating chariot-like wheels pivoting on the Earth at their centre.
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.