Following Kepler

September 25, 2023October 21, 2023

Almagest Book IX: Exploring Mercury’s Double Perigee

As a general rule, I try to stay away from using too much modern math as I work through the Almagest. The goal of this project is to try to understand how astronomers worked in a historical context – not simply examining their work through a modern lens.

However, Ptolemy’s discussion around Mercury has been greatly frustrating me. There’s several reasons for this. A large one is certainly that the language Ptolemy used is clunky which is challenging for a model that is so complex.

Therefore, I want to dig deeper into what’s happening with the double perigee and make sure I fully understand it. In particular, I previously showed a diagram from Pedersen which looked at the path the center of the epicycle would trace out for various eccentricities. This graphically showed the distance from earth over time, but I wanted something more quantitative, so in this post, we’ll derive an equation to determine the distance between the center of Mercury’s epicycle and earth as a function of the angle from apogee.

This method comes straight from Pedersen but I’ll be doing it in the context of Toomer’s translation¹. Continue reading “Almagest Book IX: Exploring Mercury’s Double Perigee”

September 19, 2023March 4, 2024

Almagest Book IX: Mercury’s Double Perigee

In our last post, I noted that Ptolemy had identified the line of apsides, but was very careful not to state which point was the apogee and which was the perigee. He’s now ready to start looking into that:

In accordance with the above, we investigated the size of the greatest elongations which occur when the mean longitude of the sun is exactly in the apogee, and again, when it is diametrically opposite that point.

Continue reading “Almagest Book IX: Mercury’s Double Perigee”

September 17, 2023September 17, 2023

Almagest Book IX: The Line of Apsides of Mercury

Having demonstrated the conceptual model, Ptolemy now turns to determining

in what part of the ecliptic Mercury’s apogee lies by the following method. Continue reading “Almagest Book IX: The Line of Apsides of Mercury”

September 16, 2023September 16, 2023

Almagest Book IX: Symmetries in Mercury’s Planetary Model

Now that we’ve demonstrated that the equation of anomaly is symmetric about the line of apsides for the general model, we’ll demonstrate the same for Mercury’s model. Or, as Ptolemy puts it,

we must prove that in this situation too the angles of the equation of ecliptic anomaly [are equal].

We’ll start by producing a diagram based on Mercury’s particular model. Continue reading “Almagest Book IX: Symmetries in Mercury’s Planetary Model”

September 16, 2023October 21, 2023

Almagest Book IX: Symmetries in the General Planetary Model

Now that we’ve laid out the models for the planets except Mercury and the special case for Mercury, Ptolemy revisits them to explore some symmetries. We’ll start with the ones for the model for the planets other than Mercury first.

To start, let’s produce a new diagram based on that model. As usual, I’ll break up Ptolemy’s description into several steps to help make it a bit more digestible. Continue reading “Almagest Book IX: Symmetries in the General Planetary Model”

September 8, 2023

T CrB Eruption Found in Medieval Manuscript

The recurrent nova T CrB is likely to erupt again in the early spring of next year. This nova has an $\approx 80$ year long cycle and only lasts for about a week, making it an extremely rare event to catch. Thus, it’s no surprise that we only had reliable records for the two most recent eruptions.

But research from Dr. Bradley Schaefer indicates that there may be two historic accounts of this star during its eruption including one in a medieval chronicle.

I’ve written more about this research over at Universe Today.

September 7, 2023September 7, 2023

Hopewell Comet Airburst Article

Recently a series of historic astronomy papers came to my attention claiming and refuting the notion that the decline of the Hopewell Native America community in the $3^{r d}$ or $4^{t h}$ century.

I’ve written a summary as an article over at Universe Today. It’s an interesting discussion so give it a read!

September 2, 2023September 16, 2023

Almagest Book IX: Model for Mercury

Now that we’ve taken the time to understand the model for the four planets other than Mercury, let’s start on the model for Mercury as that’s the focus of the remainder of this book.

Let the eccentre producing the anomaly be $A B G$ about centre $D$ , and let the diameter through $D$ and centre $E$ of the ecliptic be $\overset{―}{A D E G}$ , [passing] through the apogee at $A$ . Continue reading “Almagest Book IX: Model for Mercury”

August 31, 2023August 31, 2023

Almagest Book IX: Model for Planets Other than Mercury

Having thoroughly discussed what anomalies Ptolemy wants his model to account for as well as what hypotheses² he intends to use for each, Ptolemy is ready to start laying out the basic models. Ultimately, there will be two models. One for the four planets other than Mercury, and a special one for Mercury.

In this post, we’ll explore the first of these models. Continue reading “Almagest Book IX: Model for Planets Other than Mercury”

August 30, 2023August 30, 2023

Almagest Book IX: Preliminary Notions

Now that these [mean motions] have been tabulated, our next task is to discuss the anomalies which occur in connection with the longitudinal positions of the five planets.

Having derived the mean and anomalistic motions, Ptolemy now turns to exploring the anomalies in more depth (as there’s going to be two of them), in order to derive the parameters necessary for configuring the model’s scale. Continue reading “Almagest Book IX: Preliminary Notions”