The First Latin Treatise on Ptolemy's Astronomy
The First Latin Treatise on Ptolemy's Astronomy

Author: Henry Zepeda

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503581378

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The Almagesti minor is one of the most important works of medieval astronomy. The Almagesti minor, probably written in northern France circa 1200, is a Latin summary of the first six books of Ptolemy's astronomical masterpiece, the Almagest. Also known to modern scholars as the Almagestum parvum, the Almagesti minor provides a clear example of how a medieval scholar understood Ptolemy's authoritative writing on cosmology, spherical astronomy, solar theory, lunar theory, and eclipses. The author incorporated the findings of astronomers of the Islamic world, such as al-Battāanīi, into the framework of Ptolemaic astronomy, and he altered the format and style of Ptolemy's astronomy in order to make it accord with the author's ideals of a mathematical science, which were primarily derived from Euclid's Elements. The Almagesti minor had a profound effect upon astronomical writing throughout the 13th-15th centuries, including the work of Georg Peurbach and Johannes Regiomontanus. In this first volume of the Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus series, Henry Zepeda offers not only a critical edition of this little-studied text, but also a translation of it into English, analysis of both the text and its geometrical figures, and a thorough study of the work's origins, sources, and long-lasting influence.

Ptolemy's Almagest
Ptolemy's Almagest

Author: Ptolemy

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1998-11-08

Total Pages: 712

ISBN-13: 0691002606

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Ptolemy's Almagest is one of the most influential scientific works in history. A masterpiece of technical exposition, it was the basic textbook of astronomy for more than a thousand years, and still is the main source for our knowledge of ancient astronomy. This translation, based on the standard Greek text of Heiberg, makes the work accessible to English readers in an intelligible and reliable form. It contains numerous corrections derived from medieval Arabic translations and extensive footnotes that take account of the great progress in understanding the work made in this century, due to the discovery of Babylonian records and other researches. It is designed to stand by itself as an interpretation of the original, but it will also be useful as an aid to reading the Greek text.

A Treatise on Stars
A Treatise on Stars

Author: Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2020-02-25

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 0811229394

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An ethereal new collection that is “visceral with intellection” (David Lau) Winner of the Bollingen Prize Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime.” Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”

The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy
The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy

Author: James Evans

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1998-10-01

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 019987445X

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The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy combines new scholarship with hands-on science to bring readers into direct contact with the work of ancient astronomers. While tracing ideas from ancient Babylon to sixteenth-century Europe, the book places its greatest emphasis on the Greek period, when astronomers developed the geometric and philosophical ideas that have determined the subsequent character of Western astronomy. The author approaches this history through the concrete details of ancient astronomical practice. Carefully organized and generously illustrated, the book can teach readers how to do real astronomy using the methods of ancient astronomers. For example, readers will learn to predict the next retrograde motion of Jupiter using either the arithmetical methods of the Babylonians or the geometric methods of Ptolemy. They will learn how to use an astrolabe and how to design sundials using Greek and Roman techniques. The book also contains supplementary exercises and patterns for making some working astronomical instruments, including an astrolabe and an equatorium. More than a presentation of astronomical methods, the book provides a critical look at the evidence used to reconstruct ancient astronomy. It includes extensive excerpts from ancient texts, meticulous documentation, and lively discussions of the role of astronomy in the various cultures. Accessible to a wide audience, this book will appeal to anyone interested in how our understanding of our place in the universe has changed and developed, from ancient times through the Renaissance.

Euclid's Phaenomena
Euclid's Phaenomena

Author: J. L. Berggren

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-29

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 0429656793

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Originally published in 1996, this book contains a translation and study of Euclid's Phaenomena, a work which once formed part of the mathematical training of astronomers from Central Asia to Western Europe. Included is an introduction that sets Euclid's geometry of the celestial sphere, and its application to the astronomy of his day, into its historical context for readers not already familiar with it. So no knowledge of astronomy or advanced mathematics is necessary for an understanding of the work. The book shows mathematical astronomy shortly before the invention of trigonometry, which allowed the calculation of exact results and the subsequent composition of Ptolemy's Almagest. This work and the (roughly) contemporaneous treatises of Autolycus and Aristarchos form a corpus of the oldest extant works on mathematical astronomy. Together with Euclid's Optics one has the beginnings of the history of science as an application of mathematics.

Source Book in Astronomy, 1900-1950
Source Book in Astronomy, 1900-1950

Author: Harlow Shapley

Publisher:

Published: 1960

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13:

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The phenomenal growth of modern astronomy, including the invention of the coronagraph and major developments in telescope design and photographic technique, is unparalleled in many centuries. Theories of relativity, the concept and measurement of the expanding universe, the location of sun and planets far from the center of the Milky Way, the exploration of the interiors of stars, the pulsation theory of Cepheid variation, and investigations of interstellar space have profoundly altered the astronomer's approach. These fundamental discoveries are reported in papers by such eminent scientists as Albert Einstein, Sir Arthur S. Eddington, Henry Norris Russell, Sir James Jeans, Meghnad Saha, Otto Struve, Fred L. Whipple, Bernard Lyot, Jan H. Oort, and George Ellery Hale. The Source Book's 69 contributions represent all fields of astronomy. For example, there are reports on the equivalence of mass and energy (E = mc ) of the special theory of relativity; building the 200-inch Palomar telescope; the scattering of galaxies suggesting a rapidly expanding universe; stellar evolution; and the Big Bang and Steady State theories of the universe's origin.