Welcome to 2024 everyone!
$2023$ is now behind us, so I want to take a moment to review my progress for this year. Continue reading “2023 in Review”
Tracing the history of medieval astronomy
Welcome to 2024 everyone!
$2023$ is now behind us, so I want to take a moment to review my progress for this year. Continue reading “2023 in Review”
The past month has been rather quiet here in the blog, but there was quite a bit going on for me behind the scenes due to Gulf Wars. This was largely due to the number of classes I taught. Continue reading “All Done with Gulf Wars XXXI”
And that’s a wrap on 2022. Let’s look back on this year and remember what I got done! Continue reading “2022 in Review”
In our last post we had established that it was impossible for Ptolemy to have stolen all of his data from Hipparchus as indirect evidence of the number of stars that would have been included in Hipparchus’ catalog indicate that Ptolemy’s catalog had around $200$ stars that Hipparchus’ presumptive catalog did not. Furthermore, we cited Dreyer and Fotheringham who both showed that errors in the determination of the position of equinoxes and solstices would have resulted in the $1º$ error at the heart of the accusation against Ptolemy, eliminating the need for Ptolemy to have used Hipparchus’ catalog.
Thus, while it’s not necessary that Ptolemy took all of his data from Hipparchus, the possibility remains that he took some. But to determine that, we’d need more information about Hipparchus’ presumed catalog which is what we’ll explore in this post looking at an important 1925 paper by Vogt. Continue reading “Scholarly History of Commentary on Ptolemy’s Star Catalog: Vogt – 1925”
I’m going to take a bit of a break from direct progress on the Almagest as we get to the star catalog. This is because there is, what I feel to be a fascinating and important discussion surrounding its legitimacy and I want to explore the history of this discussion, even though almost all of it is outside the range of the SCA period1. Namely, the discussion is whether or not Ptolemy’s star catalog is legitimate, one which he took the measurements himself, or if Ptolemy stole the data from an astronomer that came before him and tried to update it, but failed due to an incorrect value for the rate of precession.
Continue reading “Scholarly History of Commentary on Ptolemy’s Star Catalog: 137 CE – 1918 CE”
Back in May of this year, I’d had a really good night observing. One of the things I always like is getting new stars added to the catalog. I still have the map I entered into Kingdom A&S in 2019 floating around my house and it’s fun to look back and see how much has gotten added since then. That night of observation added quite a few stars to be pile and inspired me to go back and animate the progress after each observing run which I placed on YouTube and then evidently forgot to share. So here it is!
Thanks to Corona, it’s been quite awhile since we’ve really had an Arts & Sciences competition here in Calontir. While we had a virtual Kingdom A&S in $2020$ the last one we had in person was Queen’s Prize in $2019$.
However, this past weekend we finally had another in person Queen’s Prize and I entered my latest paper revising Ptolemy’s models for use in the present day. My previous entry attempted to update the solar model but contained critical errors1. This was revealed when I started attempting to update the lunar model. Realizing that it was predicting solar positions that would have made the eclipses necessary to calibrate the lunar model impossible, I revisited the solar model and made the necessary corrections.
That, plus the first lunar model were included in this year’s entry which was rewritten using LaTeX for a smoother editing and reading experience as Google’s equation editor was rather poor. The paper ended up being $62$ pages (although roughly $45\%$ of that was front material and appendices) which was a lot to expect anyone to read. As such, I also created a TL;DR version for passerbys.
Continue reading “Queen’s Prize 2022 – The Astronomical Epoch for Solar and (First) Lunar Models”
Frequently, when working on my astronomical research, I come up with interesting ideas for projects that I would love to tackle, but simply don’t have the time or may not have particular skillset to dive into. This post is intended to be a list of those ideas. Continue reading “Spinoff Project Ideas”
Another year behind us. Sadly, this year was not everything I’d hoped for in terms of this astronomy project. Continue reading “2021 in Review”
Yikes. It’s been nearly two months since I made any sort of post here! Here’s a quick update on what’s been going on and there’s a little bit of astronomy in there. Continue reading “Apologies for Recent Absence”