加载中…Ptolemy’s Almagest First printed edition, 1515
(2011-01-23 17:47:25)
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托勒密天文学大成almagest风水天星七政四余果老星命天文文化 |
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陈注：此是介绍托勒密的《天文学大成》（Almagest）的最早版本。学习星占也好，纯天文也好，这本书在历史上的重要性不言而喻。
Ptolemy’s
Almagest
First
printed edition, 1515
This is a page of
the star catalogue from the first printed edition of
Ptolemy’s Almagest, published in
Venice in 1515. It follows the Latin translation made
by Gerard of
Cremona (c.1114–1187) in Toledo, Spain, in 1175.
Gerard worked from Arabic manuscripts, which were themselves
translations of the Greek original.
A page from the 1515 printing of the Almagest, showing the end of the star catalogue for Cassiopeia (top two lines) and the start of the listing of stars in Perseus.
The top two lines on the
page contain the last two stars in the listing for Cassiopeia.
Following these is a line totalling the number of stars catalogued
in Cassiopeia, as Ptolemy did at the end of every constellation
(the Latin reads ‘Thirteen stars: four of the third magnitude, six
of the fourth, one of the fifth, two of the sixth’). Then comes the
start of the entry for Perseus – the book’s owner has written
‘Perseus’ by hand in the margin to make it easier to pick
out.
Each star’s
longitude and latitude is listed, as is its brightness on a scale
from 1 to 6, the same principle as the modern magnitude scale. The
letter S in the column before the latitude stands for
septentrionalis, meaning northern (the
word is in reference to the seven stars of the Plough, which define
the northern sky). The first entry in Perseus is described as
‘nebulous’, and this is the famous Double Cluster in the hand of
Perseus.
In the
Almagest, Ptolemy identified stars not
by letters or numbers, as we would do now, but by their position in
the imaginary constellation figure. For example, Alpha Persei, the
seventh star on the list, is described as ‘the bright star on the
right side’ (‘Lucida que est in latere dextro’ in Latin), while the
twelfth entry (‘Lucida earum que sunt in capita Algol’), ‘the
bright one in the head of the Demon’, shows an Arabic influence,
since Algol is an Arab name; in the original Greek, Ptolemy had
called this the Gorgon’s head, in line with Greek mythology, which
in Latin would be ‘Gorgoneo’.
At the end of some
constellations, Ptolemy listed what he called ‘unformed’ stars
(informa) that lay outside the
recognized constellation pattern. Now that constellations are
regarded as areas of sky rather than actual pictorial
representations, these unformed stars have in most cases been
absorbed into the nearest constellation. However, in some cases,
the stars were incorporated by later astronomers into new
constellations. In the example shown below, Ptolemy lists 11 stars
as lying outside Canis Major. Of these, the first is now in
Monoceros and the fifth in Canis Major. The remainder were used by
Petrus Plancius to form a new constellation,
Columba.
Above: Eleven ‘unformed’ stars around Canis Major, as listed in the Almagest. Nine of these later became part of a new constellation, Columba. The letter M before the latitudes stands for ‘meridionalis’, Latin meaning southern.
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