ANCIENT ASTRONOMY

 The Greeks used basic geometry and trigonometry to measure the sizes and distances of the largest
appearing bodies in heavens, the Sun and the Moon.
 They believed that the earth is at the center of the universe and it is sphere-shape. The moon, the
sun, and the planets are revolving around the earth.

The Greek Philosophers

Anaxagoras
 499 BC to 428 BC
 Born in Clazomenae, Ionia (now Turkey)
 stated that the MOON is sphere – shape thus, it shines by
only half reflected sunlight at one time.
 Phases of moon and eclipses.
 Sun is a big hot rock.

Short Biography
Anaxagoras was born to a
wealthy family, but gave up his
wealth to become a scientist.
He was the first Ionian to go to
Athens, bringing the new
Ionian philosophical tradition
to the Greek homeland. He becomes friends with Pericles.
Importance to Astronomy
 Anaxagoras taught that the sun was a hot rock, and that the moon
shone from the reflected light of the sun. He also understands that
eclipses are caused when the moon passed through the shadow of the
earth (a lunar eclipse) or when the moon gets in between the sun and
the moon (a solar eclipse.) He ends up in jail in Athens for teaching
that the sun and moon were not gods, but merely places. Pericles gets
him out of jail eventually.
 Anaxagoras does not believe in a divine intelligence that runs the
universe. While he does believe that there is some sort of life force
that causes the universe, and all in it, to run, this life force isn't by
definition an intelligent thing. (Kind of like The Force in Star Wars.)
 There is a great quote attributed to Anaxagoras. He was asked what
was the purpose in being born. He replied "The investigation of sun,
moon, and heaven."
 Aristotle
 384 BC to 322 BC
 Born in Stagira, Greece
 Made the conclusion that the earth is spherical because it
always casts a curved shadow when it eclipses the moon.
 He knows that we see the moon by the light of the sun, how
the phases of the moon occur and understands how eclipses
work.

Short Biography
 Aristotle was born in Stagira,
Greece, in 384 BC. He was sent
to be a student at Plato's
Academy, and eventually
became a teacher there
himself. He was the tutor of
Alexander the Great. When
Plato died, and Aristotle was not chosen to take over Plato's Academy,
he formed his own school in Athens called the Lyceum. Aristotle
wrote about almost everything, including medicine, physics,
astronomy, biology, law, logic, and government, to name a few. Many
of his writings form the basis of Western thought.
Importance to Astronomy
 Aristotle knew that the earth was a sphere. Philosophically, he argues
that each part of the earth is trying to be pulled to the center of the
earth, and so the earth would naturally take on a spherical shape.
(Gravitationally, this is actually accurate!) He then points out
observations that support the sphericalness of the earth. First, the
shadow of the earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always
circular. The only shape that always casts a circular shadow is a
sphere. Second, as one travelled more north or south, the positions of
the stars in the sky change. There are constellations visible in the
north that one cannot see in the south and vice versa. (He uses this to
also argue that the earth isn't very big, because you don't have to
travel very far to notice the difference.) Third, he says not to discount
those who say that Morroco and India are really close to each other,
because there are elephants in both of these regions. (De Caelo, Book
II Part 14)
 Aristotle talks about the work of Eudoxus and Callippus, who had
developed an earth centered model of the planets. In these models,
the center of the earth is the center of all the other motions. While it
is not sure if Eudoxus and Callippus actually thought the planets
moved in circles, Aristotle certainly does. Aristotle even adds
"counteracting spheres" so that the motion of one sphere doesn't
interfere with the motion of the one next to it. To Aristotle, the many
spheres that carry the planets, including the sun and moon, are very
real, and he says there are 55 of them. (Metaphysics, Book XII, Part 8)
 Aristotle rejects a moving earth for two reasons. Most important is
that he doesn't understand inertia. To Aristotle, the natural state for
an object is to be at rest. He believes that it takes a force in order for
an object to move. Using Aristotle's ideas, if the earth were moving
through space, if you tripped, you would not be in contact with the
 earth, and so would get left behind in space. Since this obviously does
not happen, the earth must not move. This misunderstanding of
inertia confuses people until the time of Galileo. A second, but not as
important, reason Aristotle rejects a moving earth is that he
recognized that if the earth moved and rotated around the sun, then
"there would have to be passings and turnings of the fixed stars": the
positions of the stars would change with the seasons. (De Caelo, Book
II, part 14) In modern words, there would be an observable parallax of
the stars. One cannot see stellar parallax with the naked-eye, so
Aristotle concludes that the earth must be at rest. (The stars are so far
away, that one needs a good telescope to measure stellar parallax, first
measured in 1838.)
 Aristotle believes that the objects in the heavens are perfect and
unchanging. Since he believes that the only eternal motion is circular
with a constant speed, the motions of the planets must be circular.
This comes to be called "The Principle of Uniform Circular Motion"
and even Copernicus believes in it. The perfectness and constancy of
the heavens ends up being challenged in the late 16th century when
Tycho Brahe shows that a supernova and a comet are beyond the orbit
of the moon.
 Aristotle and his ideas become very important because they become
incorporated into the Catholic Church's theology in the twelfth
century by Thomas Aquinas. In the early 16th century, the Church
bans new interpretations of scripture in a defensive move against the
growing Protestant movement. At the time, there had been no
interpretations involving a moving earth; thus teaching a non-
geocentric model of the solar system becomes a bad thing to do.

ARISTARCHUS
 The scientist who professed the heliocentric, (Helios=Sun,
centric =centered).
 c310 BC to c230 BC
 Born in Samos
 Professed the heliocentric, (Helios=Sun, centric=centered) ;
Heliocentric theory.
 Relative distance to moon and sun.
 Relative sizes of earth, moon and sun.

Short Biography
 Born in Samos, not a lot is
known about Aristarchus. Most
of his work is lost, and we only
know about him because other
ancient Greek people talked
about him.
Importance to Astronomy
 Only one book of Aristarchus survives, "On the Sizes and Distances of
the Sun and Moon." In it he proves:
o The distance to the sun is greater than 18, but less than 20,
times the distance to the moon.
 o The radius of the sun is greater than 18, but less than 20,
times greater than the radius of the moon.
o The radius of the sun is greater than 19/3 (6.3), but less than
43/6 (7.2), times the radius of the earth.While the results are
off, his basic geometry and methods are sound. (Actually, the
sun is about 400 times farther than the moon, and about 109
times bigger than the earth.)
 Aristarchus' method for determining the relative distances to the
moon and the sun is pretty easy to understand. Imagine drawing a
triangle by connecting the centers of earth, moon and sun, When the
moon is "exactly" 1/2 full, and looks like a semicircle, then the angle
earth-moon-sun is 90, so that the distance between the earth and the
sun is the hypoteneuse of the right triangle. One just has to measure
the angle theta in the diagram, and we can say that the ratio of the
distance to the moon to the distance to the sun is equal to the cosine
of theta.
 Aristarchus said that the angle theta was 87, which is too small. It
turns out that the angle would be just under 90. In practice, it is also
difficult to accurately decide when the moon is exactly half full, and so
difficult to accurately measure the angle, so while the method is
correct, it turns out to be difficult to do.
 Aristarchus notes that the angular size of the moon and sun are the
same, which is basically true. Because of this, if the sun is about 19
times farther away than the moon, then it must be about 19 times
larger.Having calculated how much farther away the sun is than the
moon, Aristarchus is then able to calculate how much bigger the sun
is than the earth. To do this, he notes that during a lunar eclipse,
when the moon enters the shadow of the earth, the size of the shadow
is about twice the size of the moon. (Again, his data is a little off: it is
closer to 3 times the size of the moon.) The image below show the
moon, earth and sun during a lunar eclipse.

Ds = Distance to the sun; Dm = Distance to the moon; and

D = Distance from earth to apex of its shadow.
Rs = Radius of sun; Re = Radius of the earth; and R = Radius
of the earth's shadow at the moon's position.

HIPPARCHUS
 190 BC to c120 BC
 Born in Nicaea, Bithynia (now Turkey)
 determined the location of almost 850 stars which he divided
into six groups according to their brightness.
 Determines the length of the year.
 Discovers the Precession of the Equinoxes.
 He measured the length of the year to within minutes of the
modern value and developed a method for predicting the
times of lunar eclipses within a few hours.
 Applies epicycles to the sun and moon.
Short Biography
  Very little is known about Hipparchus. None of his major work
survives, and most of what is known is due to what Ptolemy
says in the Almagest. He was born in Nicaea, which is now the
modern town of Iznik in Turkey. He lived and worked in
Rhodes and Alexandria.
Importance to Astronomy
 Hipparchus is often called the first real astronomer, as he was
the first Greek to actually make systematic observations of the
sky. He was also a very talented mathematician who made great
strides in the development of the classic Greek model of the
solar system.
 Hipparchus catalogs the position and brightness of over 800
stars. He was the first person to record the actual angular
positions using the ecliptic as a base line. He ranked the stars
according to a brightness scale of six magnitudes.
 He discovered the slight wobble in the axis of the earth's
rotaion, also called the "Precession of the Equinoxes." The axis
of the earth's rotation currently points to a spot near the Polaris
- hence it is called the North Star as it doesn't move very much
over the course of the night. Because of a slight gravitational
effect, the axis is slowly rotating with a 26,000 year period, and
Hipparchus discovers this because he notices that the position
of the equinoxes along the celestial equator were slowly moving.
 He calculates the length of the year to be 365 days, 5 hours, 55
minutes and 12 seconds long and calculates his error to be no
more than 15 minutes. (It turns out he was only 6 minutes off.)
 He also came up with another way to determine the distance to
the moon. Using parallax, he was able to calculate that the
moon was between 59 and 67 earth radii away. (The correct
average distance is 60.) He did this from a solar eclipse. During
a solar eclipse, the moon just covers the sun (remember that
they are both about 1/2 degree in angular size.) However, only a
very small portion of the earth can actually witness the eclipse
in totality, because the shadow of the moon on the earth is
fairly small. Hipparchus used data from a solar eclipse viewed
from 2 different locations. The diagram below would represent a
solar eclipse as viewed from 2 different places on the earth,
labeled A and B.

Claudius Ptolemy
 C85 to C165
 Born in Alexandria, Egypt
 presented the geocentric outlook of the Greeks in its most
sophisticated model that became known as Ptolemaic system.
 Culmination of Greek Astronomy and Geocentric model of
solar system
 Wrote Syntaxis aka the Almagest
 1st working predictive model of solar system

Short Biography
  Very little is known of Ptolemy's life. He most likely grew
up in or near Alexandria, where he studied mathematics
and astronomy. While he is most known for his work in
mathematical astronomy, he wrote a number of other
books that have survived,
including Optics and Geography, which was an attempt to
make a map of the world as known by Ptolemy with
latitude and longitude measurements.
Importance to Astronomy
 Ptolemy wrote the Almagest around 150 AD. The
name Almagest actually comes from the latinized version
of the Arabic name for his work, al-majisti, meaning "the
greatest." The Greek name, Syntaxis, is short for its
original title, The Mathematical Compilation.
 With the Almagest, Ptolemy produced the first working,
predictive model of the solar system in the world, and
was the culmination of Greek astronomy and the
geocentric model. The Almagest was a complete textbook
in mathematical astronomy, and was so successful that it
became the standard in mathematical astronomy for 1400
years. The Almagest itself was broken into 13 chapters. He
begins by teaching all the mathematics that is needed for
the computations in the book, and then goes on to give
detailed descriptions of how to make astronomical
observations and mathematical models for the sun, moon
and planets.
 He includes mathematical tables and star charts, and
explains how to improve on observational data.
 He describes how to make any astronomical calculation
that one may want.
 He improved on the work of Hipparchus, and produced
the first complete working and predictive model of the
solar system, and it was the basis for mathematical
astronomy until the sixteenth century when Copernicus
introduced his heliocentric model of the solar system.
 The Greek geocentric model is still often called the
Ptolemeic system in honor of this achievement.