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Astronomical Images : Sphericity of the heavens, and refraction

Gregor Reisch

Astronomical Images

<p style='text-align: justify;'>The <i>Margarita philosophica</i> was a compendium, or 'Epitome' of university learning in the sixteenth century. It was written by the prior of the house of Carthusians at Freiburg, Gregor Reisch (d. 1525), and was first published in 1503 in Freiburg by Johannes Schott, a printer from Strasbourg. The work was illustrated amply with somewhat crude woodcuts, and was divided into twelve books, with one book each dealing with the trivium (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy), four books devoted to natural philosophy, and one book on moral philosophy. It was a popular work, reprinted numerous times during the sixteenth century, including the unauthorized, augmented editions by another printer at Strasbourg, Johann Grueninger. Oronce Fine edited and added to the Latin text of the 1535 edition. The first woodcut shows how a triangular or hexagonal mould would leave empty spaces (expressed as residual spaces inside the circle). The second woodcut indicates how a non-spherical shape of the World (a square in this case) would imply that a planet would have different distances from the Earth (shown by the perpendicular and diagonal lines from <i>Terra</i> to the planet expressed as a circle). It also shows how the Sun on the eastern horizon (<i>Oriens</i>) could appear larger than at other times because of vapours (expressed as a hatched region between the planet and Earth) on the horizon.</p>


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