I’m a bit late in getting my reflections of 2024 posted, but better late than never!
The past year has been rather different than previous years. At the end of $2023$, I was $73.22\%$ of the way through the Almagest and I ended the year at $84.80\%$ for an increase of $11.58\%$. That’s slightly less than the previous year which was $13.74\%$, but still fairly average. Although I had a large surge in progress in September which got me through the end of Book XI, my focus has since been elsewhere.
The most visible of them has been starting my YouTube channel. This has been on my list of things to do for several years now, but really came to the forefront this year for one particular reason which is that, at the larger SCA events I attend (specifically Gulf Wars and Pennsic), I’ve found myself teaching a large number of my classes. This year, I taught eight classes at each. By the end of the week, my voice is shot and I’ve gotten into deeper content that few people are interested in attending making the effort feel rather wasted. For example, the class I teach on the derivation and use of the Ptolemaic solar model tends to have less than three people attend from an event that draws $\approx 8,000$.
As I continue adding new classes to my roster1, I’ve realized that I can’t do them all if for no other reason than my voice. Thus, to make sure the knowledge stays available, I’ve known I wanted to digitize these lectures. Thus, beginning in October, I have spent a huge amount of time revising these talks, recording, and editing them.
While this hasn’t been to the exclusion of all other work, it has pushed the Almagest to the side for the time being. While I fully intend to return discuss the Almagest in these videos in depth, experience has shown that few people are ready for (or interested in) the full depth of it. Thus, I’ve focused on the broader, general knowledge topics that anyone can approach with little familiarity in the field.
However, my astronomical work has continued in some other ways that are less public. This past year, I added three books to my collected that were printed in the $16^{th}$ century. My hope is that being able to bring these period texts to life will help people be excited about the subject.
Fortunately, one of them2 has a translation available which made discussing it quite easy. Another text is a later printing of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera. The main body of this text is certainly translated, but this edition has several commentaries I want to explore which are not. Similarly, my most recent purchase, Dialoghi di Pietra Messia, is not translated at all. Thus, I’ve been spending considerable time working with these texts.
In a similar vein I discovered Peter Apian’s Instrumentum Primi Mobilis (although I don’t own a copy), which contains an interesting instrument for calculating certain trig functions. Again, this text is not translated, but I have been working on doing one, at least, enough of one to reconstruct the instrument. Also from Peter Apian, I’ve been looking more at his work Astronomicum Caesareum which is a brilliant publication using volvelles as analog computers in a beautifully illustrated text. This one also does not appear to have a translation, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time working on that.
Aside from adding antique texts to my collection, I’ve also added a large number of other texts. I’m counting $23$ (including the antiques). Most of these are modern texts by scholars, although a few are translations of older texts. One is even a bit removed from astronomy as it’s a play written by Giordano Bruno as I’m trying to understand more about the astronomers when possible. And since I’m trying to develop a broader base for the YouTube channel, I’ve been taking time to read more of these books instead of simply collecting them for later reference and hyper-focusing on the Almagest.
So, I’ve certainly not been idle in $2024$, but much less of my work has made it to this blog.
Observing this year has fallen off sharply as well. I only managed to get out on two occasions to use the quadrant and something appears to have been seriously wrong with the data on one of the nights. Thus, I have quarantined it from the rest of the data until I can play with it enough to determine if it was a systematic error caused by setting the instrument up wrong, or if we just did a really bad job of it.
I also remembered to take an observation with one of my smaller instruments on the winter solstice of the sun at solar noon, which can be used to determine things like the obliquity of the ecliptic.
Lastly, I’ve been connecting some with the historic astronomical community outside the SCA. This has largely been through the historical astronomy (HASTRO) listserve managed through West Virginia University. However, it’s also led to some discussions with a few professionals on their work and vice versa.
Outside of my astronomical work, within the SCA, I also ran one of my Barony’s annual events, which sucked up a huge amount of time in September and October.
Overall, it has been a very productive year. Just not in all the ways I imagined at the outset. Although I’m getting pretty close to the end of the Almagest, I’m not sure I’ll be able to finish in $2025$. While I would certainly like to, I seem to keep putting more on my plate at an ever increasing rate.
And, again, beyond this astronomy project, there’s a few other big things on my plate this year. The first is running another event in the SCA, but even more importantly, I’ll be getting married this spring. Thus, I’m planning on saving some PTO for a honeymoon and expect to be scaling back my participation in the SCA, primarily by not attending the major wars this year.
Looking at all of this, I expect $2025$ to be a very busy year!
- I believe I created two new classes this year: one on the constellations (which has already become a YouTube video although I’ve not yet taught it in the SCA) and one on comets (which I’ve taught in the SCA, but is not yet on YouTube).
- De la Stella Fisse