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If you had the task of gathering all of humanity’s knowledge of cosmology in one place, how would you do it? Answers to questions such as, How big is the Earth? At what date and time will the Moon be full again? What makes the Sun shine? How old is the Universe? Today a good place to start the project would be to scour the sources online. In about 150AD Claudius Ptolemaeus, better known as Ptolemy, a Greek national with Roman citizenship living in Egypt, attempted to do just that. He is best known for his encyclopaedic work written in ancient Greek “Syntaxis Mathematica”, perhaps better known as the Almagest from the Arabic Al magisti “the greatest”. He was an industrious author of many scientific and mathematical treaties but he also collected works going back hundreds of years. The Almagest was the premier source of knowledge for describing the cosmos for almost two thousand years. Nothing of the original survives, only hand written copies of hand written copies. Today's episode is partially about one su