Bøger af John M. Steele

Traces the development of the Late Babylonians' ingenious schemes for modelling planetary motion. This work reveals how medieval Islamic advances in the study of the heavens, and the design of precise astronomical instruments, led to breakthroughs by Renaissance practitioners such as Copernicus and Kepler.

This revealing work examines an approach from ancient astronomy to what was then a particularly important question, namely that of understanding the relationship between the position in the ecliptic and the time it takes for a fixed-length of the ecliptic beginning at that point to rise above the eastern horizon.

The discovery of a gradual acceleration in the moon's mean motion by Edmond Halley in the last decade of the seventeenth century led to a revival of interest in reports of astronomical observations from antiquity.