Who is astronomer ptolemy

You also probably know that planets other than our own have moons and the way to test to see whether or not something is true is by experimenting.

Thousands of years ago, these things were not widely known. The heavens above were anyone's guess, and the way things were was just the way the gods had made them. It was felt there was no need to truly understand them or put them in any kind of order. And yet, this began to change in the early days of civilization.

People in the land of Babylonia Iraq and Syria in modern times created a large city on the banks of the Euphrates River. From roughly to BC, Babylonia grew from a small town to a large city and at last became the capital of an empire. How could they understand the will of the gods to predict what would occur in their future?

Astronomy began by serving the Babylonians not as a science but as a part of their religion. Particular devotion was given to the movements of Jupiter, which they identified with their chief god Marduk , and Venus, associated with Ishtar , their goddess of war and love.

The movements of Jupiter, Venus, and the other planets were believed to be messages from the gods rather than the gods themselves and were very important in Babylonian religion. Priests would then perform various rituals, attempting to prevent the disaster.

Because the movements of the planets and stars were so important, Babylonians began to develop an exact science to analyze their positions. They began to examine the same planets and stars in the sky at different times of year and in different places.

They created MUL. Babylonia would eventually fall to the Persians in BC and lose its power and independence, but its people would always be fascinated by the stars, and a newer group of scholars in Greece would learn from them. The Greek scholars brought changes to the study of the stars. They were famous for their schools of higher knowledge, which were rather different from ours.

Students would gather around a teacher, perhaps in a beautiful grove, and ask questions and discuss among themselves what might be the answers and the best ways to figure out those answers. Many of today's colleges still aspire to this way of learning. Over the centuries, this model of discovery and debate brought many changes and new discoveries to the study of astronomy. Thales of Miletus was one of the first great mathematicians of Western civilization and the first BC to successfully predict the timing of an eclipse.

Because the telescope had not yet been invented, many early debates centered around heavenly bodies that could easily be seen from Earth and what the structure of the solar system was. Heracleides of Pontus first proposed the concept that the Earth made a daily rotation, although he also believed that the Sun and the other planets orbited the Earth each day.

Aristarchus of Samos was the first Greek philosopher to believe the solar system was organized around the Sun, rather than the Earth. Ptolemy was an astronomer and mathematician. He believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe. The word for Earth in Greek is geo, so we call this idea a "geocentric" theory. Even starting with this incorrect theory, he was able to combine what he saw of the stars' movements with mathematics, especially geometry, to predict the movements of the planets.

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The Ptolemaic System was the accepted wisdom about the motions of the solar system bodies and the importance of Earth in that system for centuries. In , the Polish scholar Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a heliocentric view which put the Sun at the center of the solar system. The heliocentric calculations he came up with for the movement of planets were further improved by Johannes Kepler's laws of motion. Interestingly, some people doubt that Ptolemy truly believed his own system, rather he merely used it as a method of calculating positions.

Ptolemy was also very important in the history of geography and cartography. He was well aware that Earth is a sphere and was the first cartographer to project the spherical shape of the planet onto a flat plane. His work, Geography remained the principal work on the subject until the time of Columbus. It contained amazingly accurate information for the time and given the difficulties of mapping that all cartographers raced. But it did have some problems, including an overestimated size and extent of the Asian landmass.

Some scholars think that the maps Ptolemy created may have been a deciding factor in Columbus's decision to sail west for the Indies and ultimately discover the continents of the western hemisphere.

Edited and updated by Carolyn Collins Petersen. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights.