Ptolemaic Universe (geocentric)    http://astro.unl.edu/naap/ssm/animations/ptolemaic.swf    The most important things to get out of this are:   - Epicycles were a very useful way to (wrongly) explain why retrograde motion happened with planets.   - Precession (the wobbling of the Earth) causes us to have different North Stars (or no North Star) at various points over the course of thousands of years.  Thus, star maps are not accurate after several hundred years.  However, this was not understood until the time of Newton and others.     Nicolaus Copernicus, 1473 - 1543             http://astro.unl.edu/naap/ssm/animations/configurationsSimulator.html   Galileo Galilei, 1564 - 1642          Galileo and his telescope:   moon craters  moons of Jupiter  phases of Venus  "rings" of Saturn  stars in the Milky Way  sunspots   Speaking of sunspots:    http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/sunspot_drawings.html         Johannes Kepler, 1571-1630  - his laws (shown below) are based o...
 
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