Book of Fixed Stars

by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 964

Reviews

[Svetlana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since the book is written in 10th century, one must know the circumstances and understand the astronomy of that period. Al-Sufi critics Ptolemy and Arabic scientists who worked in the field of both what could be called Helenistic astronomy and traditional Arabic astronomy (mostly al-'anwā'). He made mistakes, but his contributions were:
- personal observation of the stars listed in Almagest;
-he noticed some new galaxies (calling them stars and nebulas);
-he tried to connect the ancient Arabic star names with names taken and translated from ancient Greek;
- there are two drawings for each off 44 constellations that Ptolemy named, one represents the constellation on celestial globe, and other is how we see the constellation in the sky, etc.

If you can read Arabic (but you have to know that the terminology and the style of the 10th century scientific work could be the problem) and you love history of astronomy, The Book of Fixed Stars could be very interesting for you. There are French translation, there might be an English one, but I can't find it, and there will be a translation in Serbian very soon (I know this because it is the part of my PhD).

[Pardis TD · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually had read this book, as he is the astronomer who had discovered the Andromeda galaxy, according to him not so far from us. I honestly don't recall his star maps, but I'm definitely going to re-read it, a lot of them were calculated through mathematics too, and quite accurately.