مشخصات پژوهش

Some variants in the materials related to the planetary latitudes, including computational procedures, underlying parameters, numerical tables, and so on, may be addressed in the corpus of the astronomical tables preserved from the medieval Islamic period (zıj literature), which have already been classified comprehensively by Van Dalen (Current perspectives in the history of science in East Asia. Seoul National University Press, Seoul, pp 316–329, 1999). Of these, the new values obtained for the planetary inclinations and the longitude of their ascending nodes might have something to do with actual observations in the period in question, which are the main concern of this paper. The paper is in the following sections. In the first section, Ptolemy’s latitude models and their reception in Islamic astronomy are briefly reviewed. In the next section, the medieval non-Ptolemaic values for the inclinations and the longitudes of the nodal lines are introduced. The paper ends with the discussion and some concluding remarks. The derivation of the underlying inclination values from the medieval planetary latitude tables and determining the accuracy of the tables are postponed to “Appendix” in the end of the paper.