:!: [quote=https://www.loc.gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cosmos-with-carl-sagan/articles-and-essays/modeling-the-cosmos/ancient-greek-astronomy-and-cosmology]
[c][b][size=150]Ancient Greek Astronomy and Cosmology[/size]
The Sphere of the World[/b][/c]
<<By the 5th century B.C., it was widely accepted that the Earth is a sphere. This is a critical point, as there is a widespread misconception that ancient peoples thought the Earth was flat. This was simply not the case. Empedocles and Anaxagoras offered arguments for the spherical nature of the Earth. During a lunar eclipse, when the Earth is between the sun and the moon, they identified the shadow of the Earth on the moon. As the shadow moves across the moon it is clearly round. This would suggest that the Earth is a sphere.>>
[c][b]Measuring the Size of the Earth[/b][/c]
<<Lunar eclipses also allowed for another key understanding about our home here on Earth. In 3rd Century B.C., Aristarchus of Samos reasoned he could figure out the size of the Earth based on information available during a lunar eclipse:
[float=right][img3=Aristarchus's 3rd century BCE calculations on the relative sizes of, from left, the Sun, Earth and Moon, from a 10th-century CE Greek copy]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Aristarchus_working.jpg[/img3][/float]
The diagram at the right illustrates a translation of his work. The large circle is the sun, the medium circle is the Earth and the smallest circle is the moon. When the Earth is in-between the sun and the moon it causes a lunar eclipse and measuring the size of the Earth's shadow on the moon provided part of the information he needed to calculate its size.
Eratosthenes estimated Earth's circumference around 240 B.C. He used a different approach, measuring the shadows cast in Alexandria and Syene to calculate their angle relative to the Sun. There is some dispute on the accuracy of his calculations as we don't know exactly how long the units of measure were. The measurement however was relatively close to the actual size of the Earth. The Greeks were applying mathematics to theorize about the nature of their world. They held a range of beliefs about nature and the world but they were, in many cases, working to ground those beliefs in an empirical exploration of what they could reason from evidence.>>[/quote][quote=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Aristarchus)]
<<On the Sizes and Distances (of the Sun and Moon) (Περὶ μεγεθῶν καὶ ἀποστημάτων [ἡλίου καὶ σελήνης], Peri megethon kai apostematon) is widely accepted as the only extant work written by Aristarchus of Samos. This work calculates the sizes of the Sun and Moon, as well as their distances from the Earth in terms of Earth's radius.
[code]Relation Aristarchus Modern
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Earth's radius in Moon radii 2.85 3.50
Earth-Moon distance in Earth radii 20 60.32
Sun's radius in Earth radii 6.7 109
Earth-Sun distance in Earth radii 380 23,500 [/code]
The book was presumably preserved by students of Pappus of Alexandria's course in mathematics, although there is no evidence of this. The editio princeps was published by John Wallis in 1688, using several medieval manuscripts compiled by Sir Henry Savile. The earliest Latin translation was made by Giorgio Valla in 1488. There is also a 1572 Latin translation and commentary by Frederico Commandino.>>[/quote]
[quote=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos]
<<Aristarchus of Samos (Greek: Ἀρίσταρχος ὁ Σάμιος, Aristarkhos ho Samios; c. 310 – c. 230 BC) was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe, with the Earth revolving around the Sun once a year and rotating about its axis once a day. He was influenced by the concept presented by Philolaus of Croton (c. 470 – 385 BC) of a fire at the center of the universe, but Aristarchus identified the "central fire" with the Sun and he put the other planets in their correct order of distance around the Sun.
Like Anaxagoras before him, Aristarchus suspected that the stars were just other bodies like the Sun, albeit farther away from Earth. Often, his astronomical ideas were rejected in favor of the geocentric theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy. However, Nicolaus Copernicus knew about the possibility that Aristarchus had a 'moving Earth' theory, although it is unlikely that Copernicus was aware that it was a heliocentric theory.>>[/quote]