2.2 Ancient astronomy  (Page 4/12)

Eratosthenes was told that on the first day of summer at Syene, Egypt (near modern Aswan), sunlight struck the bottom of a vertical well at noon. This indicated that the Sun was directly over the well—meaning that Syene was on a direct line from the center of Earth to the Sun. At the corresponding time and date in Alexandria, Eratosthenes observed the shadow a column made and saw that the Sun was not directly overhead, but was slightly south of the zenith, so that its rays made an angle with the vertical equal to about 1/50 of a circle (7°). Because the Sun’s rays striking the two cities are parallel to one another, why would the two rays not make the same angle with Earth’s surface? Eratosthenes reasoned that the curvature of the round Earth meant that “straight up” was not the same in the two cities. And the measurement of the angle in Alexandria, he realized, allowed him to figure out the size of Earth. Alexandria, he saw, must be 1/50 of Earth’s circumference north of Syene ( [link] ). Alexandria had been measured to be 5000 stadia north of Syene. (The stadium was a Greek unit of length, derived from the length of the racetrack in a stadium.) Eratosthenes thus found that Earth’s circumference must be 50 × 5000, or 250,000 stadia.

How eratosthenes measured the size of earth.

It is not possible to evaluate precisely the accuracy of Eratosthenes solution because there is doubt about which of the various kinds of Greek stadia he used as his unit of distance. If it was the common Olympic stadium, his result is about 20% too large. According to another interpretation, he used a stadium equal to about 1/6 kilometer, in which case his figure was within 1% of the correct value of 40,000 kilometers. Even if his measurement was not exact, his success at measuring the size of our planet by using only shadows, sunlight, and the power of human thought was one of the greatest intellectual achievements in history.

Hipparchus and precession

Perhaps the greatest astronomer of antiquity was Hipparchus , born in Nicaea in what is present-day Turkey. He erected an observatory on the island of Rhodes around 150 BCE, when the Roman Republic was expanding its influence throughout the Mediterranean region. There he measured, as accurately as possible, the positions of objects in the sky, compiling a pioneering star catalog with about 850 entries. He designated celestial coordinates for each star, specifying its position in the sky, just as we specify the position of a point on Earth by giving its latitude and longitude.