History of Astronomy - 1

Ancient science highlights:

Epicycles

Precession

From class:

http://astro.unl.edu/naap/ssm/animations/ptolemaic.swf




The most important things to get out of this were:

- Epicycles were a very useful way to (wrongly) explain why retrograde motion happened with planets.

- Precession (the wobbling of the Earth) causes us to have different North Stars (or no North Star) at various points over the course of thousands of years.  Thus, star maps are not accurate after several hundred years.  However, this was not understood until the time of Newton and others.


2000 years later.....

Scientific Revolution

N. Copernicus, d. 1543

  De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium


http://astro.unl.edu/naap/ssm/heliocentric.html

If you're even more curious:

http://astro.unl.edu/naap/ssm/animations/configurationsSimulator.html

Next time:

Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642

  Siderius Nuncius

  Dialogue on Two World Systems

(J. Kepler, C. Huygens, R. Descartes, et. al.)

Isaac Newton, 1642-1727

  Principia Mathematica, 1687