Researched
Ancient astronomy
Babylonian records and Greek geometry produced models of the sky that predicted eclipses and planets for 1,500 years.
Open in the interactive tree →Babylonian astronomers logged eclipses and planets from about 700 BC. Hipparchus (~130 BC) built a star catalogue and discovered the precession of the equinoxes, and Ptolemy's Almagest (~150 AD) became the standard Earth-centred model. Aristarchus (~270 BC) had proposed a Sun-centred system but it was not accepted.
Prerequisites
- Writing~3200 BC
- Number Systems & Place Value~3000-2000 BC
- Geometry (Euclid)~300 BC
- Trigonometry~150 BCPtolemy computed planetary positions with Hipparchus' chord tables