Welcome to 2024 everyone!
$2023$ is now behind us, so I want to take a moment to review my progress for this year.
Looking at my progress graph for this year, it started in the middle of the huge bump that came from transcribing the star catalog. But let’s be fair – copying a table is a bit of a freebie.
Thus, the real work against the Almagest really began after I finished that transcription which was $59.48\%$. And this year, I finished at $73.22\%$ for a total progress of $13.74\%$ making this my most productive year yet.
I think a good portion of the reason for this is the material has been easier. The lunar model was by far the most challenging and now that we’re past that, it’s much smoother sailing. Mercury was somewhat troublesome due to its extra complicated model, but since it was similar to the lunar model, it wasn’t that bad.
However, my observing this year has fallen off almost completely. I managed to observe on three occasions (only one of which I ever wrote a post for), all of them in the first half of the year.
Unfortunately, at one of the events I took the quadrant to this year, the “wings” on the back side of the quadrant was broken. This doesn’t stop it from functioning all together, but does mean that I can’t observe solo. However, needing to fix this has damped my excitement for observing.
Another dud for the year was my attempt to engage a wider audience in period astronomy with the Ptolemaic Zodiac Project. It only saw a couple entries, but quickly faded into obscurity. However, this project isn’t really time sensitive and I’ll probably do another push to revive it come the equinox.
Another spin off project that popped up this year was when I discovered that many of the Almagest manuscripts are easy to find online and that the Greek numerals are quite easy to read. This has led to another project in which I’m trying to reproduce the work of Peters & Knobel in digital format by transcribing the various manuscripts into a single spreadsheet for comparison.
The wider hope is that I can eventually collect enough that I can start looking for hints at the lineage. This has already turned up some interesting results for the Cambridge MS 32 which was not previously discovered and I was able to demonstrate that it was likely either copied from the Paris Codex $2389$ or they were both copied from the same manuscript.
Although I didn’t make a blog post about it previously, this was part of my submission into Calontir’s Kingdom Arts & Sciences Championship this year. This competition requires three entries, each in a different category. Thus, this paper was only $\frac{1}{3}$ of the total submission1. For those interested, it can be read here.
This entry was quite well received and resulted in my victory in the Championship.
I’ve also added a few new books to my library including Ptolemy’s Catalogue of Stars by Peters & Knobel which was what really kicked off the aforementioned project. This book is brilliant in that it offers a comparison of values from the various manuscripts, although I’m finding it to have many flaws.
Next, I picked up Dreyer’s History of Astronomy: From Thales to Kepler. I haven’t finished reading this one, but it’s actually quite good I didn’t discover this six years ago as it looks to answer many of the questions that I had when starting this project. Had they been so easily answered, I probably never would have fallen down this rabbit hole.
I’m also starting to understand that there’s more to the Babylonian theory than just observations and the identification of basic returns. While I’m still not seeing an indication that they had the “cinematic models” (as Neugebauer describes them) of the later Greeks, they clearly had some sort of mathematical models. This led me to pick up a copy of Swerdlow’s Babylonian Theory of the Planets which I will probably hold off on reading for quite some time2.
Although it hasn’t arrived yet, I also ordered a copy of Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus by Swerdlow & Neugebauer. It seemed fitting since I’m finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel for the Almagest. De Revolutionibus is the next book I really want to tackle although I’ll probably be spending some time trying to get at least a cursory handle on the Islamic astronomers and others in the numerous centuries between these Ptolemy and Copernicus and have several sources on those already in my library.
So what shall $2024$ hold?
My hope is that I will be able to near completion on the Almagest this year. We have three planets remaining to determine their preliminary models. However, at this point, that only gets us to their positions along their circles; we still haven’t worked out how that translates to anomaly in a calculable fashion. And we still haven’t touched on the latitude of them.
However, because the models are all inherently similar my expectation is that these should all go quickly.
I don’t really have any new classes in mind this coming year, but I expect I’ll be teaching the same series I did this past year again.
Hopefully I can get the quadrant fixed and return to observing as well.
And as a personal note, In November of this past year, I got engaged. So I suspect there’ll be a wedding this year to contend with as well.