Moon: Ptolemaeus

Location of Ptolemaeus Crater
Image &cop7; 2010 Lupu Victor Astronomy

Ptolemaeus Crater

Ptolemaeus is an ancient lunar impact crater close to the center of the near side. The features of Ptolemaeus are highlighted when the Sun is at low angles during the first and last quarter. At full Moon the Sun is directly overhead and the crater contours become more difficult to discern.

To the south-southeast, Ptolemaeus is joined to the rim of the crater Alphonsus by a section of rugged, irregular terrain, and these form a prominent chain with Arzachel to the south. To the southeast is Albategnius and to the north is the smaller but well-defined Herschel.

"AS16-M-0990". Licensed under Public Domain via Commons
Ptolemaeus Crater from Apollo 16. NASA picture

The somewhat dark-hued floor of Ptolemaeus is notable for several ghost craters, formed where lava has covered a pre-existing crater.The crater has a low, irregular outer rim that is heavily worn and impacted with multiple smaller craters. The crater has no central peak, a lava-flooded floor, and lacks a ray system. Impact sites of this form are often classified as walled plains, due to their resemblance to the maria.The somewhat dark-hued floor of Ptolemaeus is notable for several ghost craters, formed where lava has covered a pre-existing crater.

On either side of this crater are linear, irregular gashes in the lunar surface, forming valley-like features. These features are approximately parallel to each other and radiate from the direction of Mare Imbrium to the north-northwest.
Wikipedia (sentences rearranged by ML)

Claudius Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy (Greek: Κλαύδιος Πτολεμαῖος, Klaúdios Ptolemaîos, Latin: Claudius Ptolemaeus; c. AD 100 – c. 170)  was a Greco-Egyptian writer of Alexandria, known as a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in the city of Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt, wrote in Koine Greek, and held Roman citizenship. Beyond that, few reliable details of his life are known.

The Almagest

The Almagest is the only surviving comprehensive ancient treatise on astronomy.

Babylonian astronomers had developed arithmetical techniques for calculating astronomical phenomena; Greek astronomers such as Hipparchus had produced geometric models for calculating celestial motions. Ptolemy, however, claimed to have derived his geometrical models from selected astronomical observations by his predecessors spanning more than 800 years, though astronomers have for centuries suspected that his models' parameters were adopted independently of observations.

Ptolemy presented his astronomical models in convenient tables, which could be used to compute the future or past position of the planets. The Almagest also contains a star catalogue, which is a version of a catalogue created by Hipparchus.

Its list of forty-eight constellations is ancestral to the modern system of constellations, but unlike the modern system they did not cover the whole sky (only the sky Hipparchus could see).

Through the Middle Ages, it was the authoritative text on astronomy, with its author becoming an almost mythical figure, called Ptolemy, King of Alexandria. The Almagest was preserved, like most of Classical Greek science, in Arabic manuscripts (hence its familiar name). Because of its reputation, it was widely sought and was translated twice into Latin in the 12th century, once in Sicily and again in Spain.

16th-century representation of the Ptolemy's geocentric model
"Ptolemaicsystem-small" by Fastfission - from Edward Grant, "Celestial Orbs in the Latin Middle Ages",
Isis, Vol. 78, No. 2. (Jun., 1987), pp. 152-173..
Licensed under Public Domain via Commons

Ptolemy's model, like those of his predecessors, was geocentric and was almost universally accepted until the appearance of simpler heliocentric models during the scientific revolution.

His Planetary Hypotheses went beyond the mathematical model of the Almagest to present a physical realization of the universe as a set of nested spheres, in which he used the epicycles of his planetary model to compute the dimensions of the universe.

He estimated the Sun was at an average distance of 1,210 Earth radii, while the radius of the sphere of the fixed stars was 20,000 times the radius of the Earth.

Ptolemy presented a useful tool for astronomical calculations in his Handy Tables, which tabulated all the data needed to compute the positions of the Sun, Moon and planets, the rising and setting of the stars, and eclipses of the Sun and Moon.

In the Phaseis (Risings of the Fixed Stars), Ptolemy gave a parapegma, a star calendar or almanac, based on the hands and disappearances of stars over the course of the solar year.
Wikipedia

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