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The first observations of the full planetary phases of Venus were by Galileo at the end of 1610 (though not published until 1613 in the Letters on Sunspots).Using a telescope, Galileo was able to observe Venus going through a full set of phases, something prohibited by the Ptolemaic system that assumed Venus to be a perfect celestial body.
The geocentric model held sway into the early modern age, but from the late 16th century onward, it was gradually superseded by the heliocentric model of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. There was much resistance to the transition between these two theories, since for a long time the geocentric postulate produced more accurate results.
In contrast, the geocentric model of Ptolemy predicted that only crescent and new phases would be seen, since Venus was thought to remain between the Sun and Earth during its orbit around the Earth. Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus proved that it orbited the Sun and lent support to (but did not prove) the heliocentric model. Source
In particular, Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus, which showed it to circle the Sun, and the observation of moons orbiting Jupiter, contradicted the geocentric model of Ptolemy, which was backed and accepted by the Roman Catholic Church, [7] [8] and supported the Copernican model advanced by Galileo. [9]
It is conceptually a geocentric model, ... The Tychonic system was an acceptable alternative as it explained the observed phases of Venus with a static Earth.
In the geocentric model of the solar system, as Venus moves on its epicycle (while the epicycle moves around the Earth), it is always in between the Earth and the Sun. Therefore, the only possible phases of Venus would be new and crescent phases.
In 1610, Galileo observed that Venus had a full set of phases, similar to the phases of the moon we can observe from Earth. This was explainable by the Copernican or Tychonic systems which said that all phases of Venus would be visible due to the nature of its orbit around the Sun, unlike the Ptolemaic system which stated only some of Venus's ...
Around 420 AD Martianus Capella describes a modified geocentric model, in which the Earth is at rest in the center of the universe and circled by the Moon, the Sun, three planets and the stars, while Mercury and Venus circle the Sun. [49] His model was not widely accepted, despite his authority; he was one of the earliest developers of the ...