Talk about science of astronomy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Talk about science of astronomy - Essay Example It is from these humble beginnings that astronomy takes off to become one of the important sciences, as it provides the means to look back to the origin of all life including human kind, as well look forward to provide glimpses of what could happen in the future to the universe that we all live in. Early astronomy made known to the ancients the existence of five planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter besides the sun, moon and the stars with their visibility to the naked eye. To the Egyptians and the Chinese go the initial credits in astronomy. The Egyptians divided the stars into constellations, but in a different manner than what is known today, and the Chinese with their keen observation came to understand eclipses. However, early astronomy was affected significantly by the limitations of the vision of the naked eye. This gave rise to many fallacies that were to remain a part of early astronomy. These fallacies included the belief that the earth was flat and the earth was the centre of the universe, around which all other objects in space went round and round. That was what they saw and hence the believed it. It was not until development of astronomy in its true form, in Greece from approximately 600 B.C. onwards that there was a better understanding of the universe we lived. It was Aristotle who, based on his observations, suggested that the earth was round. Eratosthenes in 240 B.C. calculated the circumference of the earth, and Hipparchus drew up an accurate catalogue of the stars. Amidst these contributions from the Greeks was also the contribution of Ptolemy towards extending the false geo-centric belief, as he devised an ingenious system to explain observations on earth from a geo-centric perspective. The Church was to extend support to this theory and it remained in place for many centuries, right up to the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century Nicolas Copernicus based on the observations of the movements of the sum moon and