Arabic in the Sciences
Book of the Fixed Stars
صور الكواكب الثابتة
Al-Sufi's Book of the Fixed Stars – the figures of the constellations and their stars – was never translated into Latin as a text, yet its drawings reached Europe in Latin manuscripts and in the star book made for Alfonso X, king of Castile. And from the English orientalist Thomas Hyde's quotations of it, the Italian astronomer Piazzi took about a hundred Arabic star names into his catalogue of 1814.
- Author
- Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (Azophi) (d. 986)
- Field
- Astronomy
- Arabic title
- كتاب صور الكواكب الثابتة
- Latin title
- Not translated as a text; its drawings travelled in the «Sufi Latinus» manuscripts (Liber de locis stellarum fixarum)
See also: Stars with Arabic Names
The Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
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Sources
- P. Kunitzsch, «Ṣūfī», Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (Springer, 2007), p. 1110
- P. Kunitzsch, «A Medieval Reference to the Andromeda Nebula», The Messenger 49 (1987)
- Ihsan Hafez, Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi and his Book of the Fixed Stars (PhD thesis, James Cook University, 2010)
- The Saxl Project, Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Ms. 1036: Sufi latinus
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