Hipparchus: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:05, 25 June 2007

Revision as of 02:19, 25 June 2007

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Hipparchus' original catalog has not been preserved today. However, an analysis of an ancient statue of [[Atlas (mythology)|Atlas]] (the so-called [[Farnese Atlas]]) published in [[2005]] shows stars at positions that appear to have been determined using Hipparchus' data. [http://www.phys.lsu.edu/farnese/].

As with most of his work, Hipparchus' star catalog was adopted and expanded by Ptolemy. Although it has been strongly disputed how much of the star catalog in the ''[[Almagest]]'' is due to Hipparchus, statistical and statisticalspatial analysis (by [[Roberthttp://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Russell_Newton Russell Newton #weblinks|R. R. Newton]], [[Dennis Rawlins]], [[Keith Pickering]], [[Almagest|Gerd Grasshoff]], and [[http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~dduke Dennis Duke]]) hashave shown conclusively that the ''[[Almagest]]'' star catalog is almost entirely Hipparchan. Ptolemy has even (since Brahe, 1598) been accused by astronomers of fraud for stating that(''Syntaxis'' hebook re-measured7 allchapter stars:4) mostthat ofhe hisobserved positionsall are1025 wrong andstars: in most cases he used Hipparchus' data and precessed them to his own epoch three centuries later, but using an erroneous (too small) precession constant.

In any case the work started by Hipparchus has had a lasting heritage, and has been worked on much later by [['Abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi|Al Sufi]] ([[964]]), and by [[Ulugh Beg]] as late as [[1437]]. It was superseded only by more accurate observations after invention of the [[telescope]].