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Hipparchus (Astronomer): Moon
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In the second book, Hipparchus starts from the opposite extreme assumption: he assigns a (minimum) distance to the Sun of 490 Earth radii. This would correspond to a parallax of 7', which is apparently the greatest parallax that Hipparchus thought would not be noticed (for comparison: the typical resolution of the human eye is about 2'; Tycho Brahe made naked eye observation with an accuracy down to 1'). In this case, the shadow of the Earth is a cone rather than a cylinder as under the first assumption. Hipparchus observed (at lunar eclipses) that at the mean distance of the Moon, the diameter of the shadow cone is 2+½ lunar diameters. That apparent diameter is, as he had observed, 360/650 degrees. With these values and simple geometry, Hipparchus could determine the mean distance; because it was computed for a minimum distance of the Sun, it is the maximum mean distance possible for the Moon.
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Hipparchus was a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician of the Hellenistic period. Hipparchus was born in Nicaea , and probably died on the island of Rhodes. He is known to have been a working astronomer at least from 147 BC to 127 BC. Hipparchus is considered the greatest astronomical observer and, by some, the greatest overall astronomer of antiquity. He was the first Greek to develop quantitative and accurate models for the motion of the Sun and Moon.
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Hipparchus ... studied the motion of the Moon and confirmed the accurate values for some periods of its motion that Chaldean astronomers had obtained before him. d. Expressed as 29 days + 12 hours + 793/1080 hours this value has been used later in the Hebrew calendar (possibly from Babylonian sources). The Chaldeans also knew that 251 synodic month s = 269 anomalistic months. Hipparchus extended this period by a factor of 17, because after that interval the Moon also would have a similar latitude, and it is close to an integer number of years (345). Therefore, eclipses would reappear under almost identical circumstances. The period is 126007 days 1 hour (rounded).
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Hipparchus is recognised as the first mathematician who compiled a trigonometry table, which he needed when computing the eccentricity of the orbits of the Moon and Sun. He tabulated values for the chord function, which gives the length of the chord for each angle. He did this for a circle with a circumference of 21,600 and a radius of (rounded) 3438 units: this has a unit length of 1 arc minute along its perimeter. He tabulated the chords for angles with increments of 7.5°.
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Now Hipparchus made such an examination principally from the sun. Since from other properties of the sun and moon (of which a study will be made below) it follows that if the distance of one of the two luminaries is given, the distance of the other is ... given, he tries by conjecturing the distance of the sun to demonstrate the distance of the moon. First, he assumes the sun to show the least perceptible parallax in order to find its distance. After this, he makes use of the solar eclipse adduced by him, first as if the sun shows no perceptible parallax, and for exactly that reason the ratios of the moon's distances appeared different to him for each of the hypotheses he set out. But with respect to the sun, not only the amount of its parallax, but also whether it shows any parallax at all is altogether doubtful.
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Hipparchus devised a geometrical method to find the parameters from three positions of the Moon, at particular phases of its anomaly. In fact, he did this separately for the eccentric and the epicycle model. Ptolemy describes the details in the Almagest IV.11. Hipparchus used two sets of three lunar eclipse observations, which he carefully selected to satisfy the requirements. The eccentric model he fitted to these eclipses from his Babylonian eclipse list: 22/23 December 383 BC, 18/19 June 382 BC, and 12/13 December 382 BC. The epicycle model he fitted to lunar eclipse observations made in Alexandria at 22 September 201 BC, 19 March 200 BC, and 11 September 200 BC.
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