Another year behind us. Sadly, this year was not everything I’d hoped for in terms of this astronomy project.
Despite starting off the year with a nice series of posts in January, progress on the Almagest this year has been quite stalled. Whereas last year I made it through $12.81$% of the text, this year I only managed $6.02$%.
In large part, this is due to the difficulty of the text we’re working through. At the beginning of the year, we were still working on finishing up the scale of the models for the sun/moon which, while not exactly simple, is at least planar geometry and relatively easy for me to visualize. However, we quickly moved past that into parallax which I struggle with visualizing. And once that was worked out, we then started combining the solar, lunar, and parallax in order to get into eclipse prediction. The number of things that are brought to bear here has significantly slowed me down as I struggle to keep them all in my head at once.
In a similar vein, this portion is challenging in other ways. As Toomer and Neugebauer have noted, Ptolemy’s work in the eclipse section is some of the poorest in the book. There are several parts that are flatly incorrect and dealing with them is a struggle. In large part, this is because Ptolemy simply states many things without offering an explanation. While, presumably, they should be somewhat obvious from the previous portions of the Almagest, being unable to arrive at the same values is concerning as I am never sure whether it’s something I’ve done wrong, Ptolemy did wrong, or was due to differences in rounding (as Ptolemy is very haphazard about this). This is, in fact, the reason I’m stuck on a post right now – The numbers I come up with are far enough removed from Ptolemy’s that I feel uncomfortable about it and he hasn’t shown any work to help me understand what he’s done.
Beyond just the difficulty of the text, a significant portion of my time this year was devoted to other things beyond the Almagest, many of them still related to the project. The first of those was classes. This year, I taught a total of six classes although two of those were repeated for different groups. However, two of those classes, De Sphaera and Mathematics of the Almagest were both entirely new classes.
The second distraction was working on papers for future Arts & Sciences competitions. Initially, this was trying to update Ptolemy’s lunar model for present day. But, as we’ve seen, the calibration of the lunar model makes use of the solar model. And while attempting to use the solar model, I discovered it was significantly further off than I should have expected.
Thus, I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the source of the error and eventually did so. This required a significant rewrite of the solar paper and, since it needed to be bundled with the lunar paper anyway, I decided to consolidate them into a single document. However, I’d made the poor life choice of doing the solar paper in Google Docs, and the lunar paper in Microsoft Word. Sadly, I wasn’t happy with the formatting of the equations in either one and decided that I should take the more professional angle and use LaTeX. While all the equations for this blog are in LaTeX, there’s a lot more formatting that goes on in a standalone document that I had to learn. This side project easily ate two months from this year, and I’m still nowhere near finished with the lunar paper.
The third non-astronomical thing that hampered progress was being the autocrat for one of the first big in-person events our kingdom had. This easily ate most of my free time for at least a month, but in reality, it was probably closer to two.
Observing this year was also down significantly from last year having only gotten to observe five times throughout the entire year. The weather was pretty awful every good moon phase during the nicest part of the year. Although, I shouldn’t entirely blame the weather. The months long wildfires in California resulted in haze that ended up hampering observing as well.
Most years, there’s a good spike in my progress towards the end of the year due to lots of days off work. However, this year I started a new job which doesn’t have as many holidays this time of year, and I hadn’t earned up that much PTO yet. And even though I still have evenings free, not being able to sit down and devote entire days to working on the Almagest really killed the momentum. In addition, during the little time I have had off the past few weeks, I wasn’t able to do much work due to illness. While the at home test for COVID was negative, I’m fairly confident it was, in fact, the omicron variant as it’s been spreading like wildfire, doesn’t show up as well on the tests, and the cold/sinus infection like symptoms were pretty spot on. I’m mostly better now, but losing my prime time of the year to work on this to having zero energy and severe brain fog was a hard hit.
The highlight this year, however, was the Sky & Telescope issue featuring my quadrant getting published. This was a much appreciated piece of recognition in a year when so much else was going wrong.
When the article was published, I posted about it in the SCA facebook page and had someone reach out to me who lives in the East kingdom. He had done something vaguely similar $30$ years ago in the SCA, building a triquetrum instead of a quadrant, and used it to make observations. While he hadn’t attempted to work through the Almagest in near as much detail as I did, he had worked through some and so we’ve begun setting up monthly meetings to discuss and are working to develop a small SCA astronomical community for those that might be interested in the observational and mathematical side of things.
Hopefully $2022$ will be a better year. With any luck, I’ll be able to finish Book VI which will get us completely out of the sun and moon. Then we can get on to the stars and planets which I’m hoping can’t be as complex as this eclipse prediction!