

Hello future astronomers! I'm Astro, your friendly alien astronaut and today I will be sharing with you the history of astronomy!


Now, astronomy is a very very old science and we are still learning about what is out there in the universe, we haven't even been out of our own solar system! One of the first people to learn about space are the Babylonians and Sumerians, who created our calendar!

The Sumerians recorded extremely big and extremely small numbers with ease thanks to their usage of a place-value number system known as sexagesimal, which is a complicated word that means base 60. These days, it's equivalent to splitting an hour into sixty minutes or a circle into 360 degrees. For that, we may thank the Sumerians!

Then, there were the Babylonians who focused on a select group of stars and constellations known as the Ziqpu stars, which is a fun word meaning high point. Among these constellations include the Lady of Life, the demon with the Open Mouth, the Stag, the Old Man, and the Crook. They were quite creative with their names!

The Babylonians kept their findings in various astronomical tablets. One very famous one is the Enūma Anu Enlil, meaning Venus tablet of Ammi-saduqa. This tablet lists the first and last visible risings of Venus over a period of about 21 years.

Babylonian and Sumerian astronomy has inspired much of what was done in Greek and Hellenistic astronomy, classical Indian astronomy, Islamic, Asian, and Western European!

Traveling west to Greece, the first geometrical and three dimensional models to explain the apparent motion of the planets were developed in the 4th century, that's a long long time ago!

Philosopher and ancient astronomer , Plato described the universe as a spherical body divided into circles carrying the planets and governed according to harmonic intervals by a "world soul."

His student, Aristotle, proposed that the universe was made of a complex system of concentric spheres meaning circular spheres in a more professional way, whose circular motions combined to carry the planets around Earth.

Then came Hipparchus, who made the first measurement of precession and the compilation of the first star catalog. The catalog included the positions of about 850 stars, in which he proposed our modern system of apparent magnitudes. He tracked 850 stars without any of the technology we have today!


Moving on to Ptolemy, who wrote the Almagest. This focused on the apparent motions of the stars and planets that we now know as retrograde motion. It established the model of a geocentric universe!
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Hello future astronomers! I'm Astro, your friendly alien astronaut and today I will be sharing with you the history of astronomy!


Now, astronomy is a very very old science and we are still learning about what is out there in the universe, we haven't even been out of our own solar system! One of the first people to learn about space are the Babylonians and Sumerians, who created our calendar!

The Sumerians recorded extremely big and extremely small numbers with ease thanks to their usage of a place-value number system known as sexagesimal, which is a complicated word that means base 60. These days, it's equivalent to splitting an hour into sixty minutes or a circle into 360 degrees. For that, we may thank the Sumerians!
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