Putting this video together was pretty challenging. The original script was 2 pages longer than the final version. This was mostly due to Chapter 6 in which we explore the possible eclipse intervals.
While the concept in that chapter is pretty simple, Ptolemy’s execution is weird as he regularly flips back and forth between using the position of the moon about its inclined circle and the position of the sun about the ecliptic. I’ve yet to make complete sense of it, but it significantly muddies the water here. Originally, I went through each of the possible intervals he explores in some detail, but decided this was too much for what is meant to be a conceptual video. Thus, that chapter had to be completely rewritten.
Chapter 4 was also a problem as it does a lot of the heavy lifting to set up Chapter 5 (exploring the eclipse windows) and I got lost in that foreshadowing instead of sufficiently explaining how Ptolemy approached finding the true syzygy from the mean.
And speaking of syzygies, conjunction and opposition, I find that I have weird feelings about words sometimes. I have a positive association with the word “conjunction” and kinda dislike the word “opposition”. Thus, I had a large number of instances in which I put “conjunction” into the script when I should have said “opposition”. This was, obviously, corrected, but that was a lot of re-recordings right there. And sometimes I just said syzygy even though specifying which type would have been entirely appropriate.