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Hipparchus (Astronomer): Almagest Iv
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Hipparchus made his measurements with an armillary sphere, and obtained the positions of at least 850 stars. It is disputed which coordinate system(s) he used. Ptolemy's catalog in the Almagest, which is derived from Hipparchus' catalog, is given in ecliptic coordinates. However Delambre in his Histoire de l'Astronomie Ancienne (1817) concluded that Hipparchus knew and used the equatorial coordinate system, a conclusion challenged by Otto Neugebauer in his A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy (1975). Hipparchus seems to have used a mix of ecliptic coordinates and equatorial coordinates: in his commentary on Eudoxos he provides stars' polar distance (equivalent to the declination in the equatorial system), right ascension (equatorial), longitude (ecliptical), polar longitude (hybrid), but not celestial latitude.
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At the end of his career, Hipparchus wrote a book called Peri eniausÃou megéthous("On the Length of the Year") about his results. The established value for the tropical year , introduced by Callippus in or before 330 BC (possibly from Babylonian sources, see above), was 365 + 1/4 days. Hipparchus' equinox observations gave varying results, but he himself points out (quoted in AlmagestIII.1(H195)) that the observation errors by himself and his predecessors may have been as large as 1/4 day. So he used the old solstice observations, and determined a difference of about one day in about 300 years. days = 365 days 5 hours 48 min 45 s by only about 6 min).
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Hipparchus probably compiled a list of Babylonian astronomical observations; G. Toomer, a historian of astronomy, has suggested that Ptolemy's knowledge of eclipse records and other Babylonian observations in the Almagest came from a list made by Hipparchus. Hipparchus' use of Babylonian sources has always been known in a general way, because of Ptolemy's statements. However, Franz Xaver Kugler demonstrated that the synodic and anomalistic periods that Ptolemy attributes to Hipparchus had already been used in Babylonian ephemerides, specifically the collection of texts nowadays called "System B" (sometimes attributed to Kidinnu).[7]
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