Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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's Almagest was an authoritative text on astronomy for more than a thousand years, and the Tetrabiblos, its companion volume, was equally influential in astrology, the study of the effects of astronomical cycles on earthly matters.
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 ...
Ptolemy emphasised that the epicycle motion does not apply to the Sun. His main contribution to the model was the equant points. He also re-arranged the heavenly spheres in a different order than Plato did (from Earth outward): Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and fixed stars, following a long astrological tradition and the ...
Ptolemy did not invent or work out this order, which aligns with the ancient Seven Heavens religious cosmology common to the major Eurasian religious traditions. It also follows the decreasing orbital periods of the Moon, Sun, planets and stars.
The basic elements of Ptolemaic astronomy, showing a planet on an epicycle (smaller dashed circle), a deferent (larger dashed circle), the eccentric (×) and an equant (•). Equant (or punctum aequans) is a mathematical concept developed by Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD to account for the observed motion of the planets. The equant is ...
An introduction to Ptolemy's Almagest, the Tashil al-Majisti, believed to be written by Thābit ibn Qurra, presented minor variations of Ptolemy's distances to the celestial spheres. [33] In his Zij , Al-Battānī presented independent calculations of the distances to the planets on the model of nesting spheres, which he thought was due to ...
The table of chords, created by the Greek astronomer, geometer, and geographer Ptolemy in Egypt during the 2nd century AD, is a trigonometric table in Book I, chapter 11 of Ptolemy's Almagest, [1] a treatise on mathematical astronomy. It is essentially equivalent to a table of values of the sine function.