But an error of ten minutes arc amounts to one-third of the apparent width of the full moon in the sky; the Alexandrian astronomers had done better than that. Having made the stars his main business in life, why in heaven’s name did the prosperous Canon never order the instruments which would have made him happier than Pythagoras? Apart from his niggardliness, which had grown worse as the bitter years went by, there existed a deeper, anxious reason for this: Canon Koppernigk was not particularly fond of stargazing. He preferred to rely on the observations of Chaldeans, Greeks, and Arabs – a
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