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ALBATEGNIUS, Mohammed ibn Jafir (858-929 A.D.). De scientia stellarum liber. Bologna: Victor Benati, 1645.
ALBATEGNIUS, Mohammed ibn Jafir (858-929 A.D.). De scientia stellarum liber. Bologna: Victor Benati, 1645. 4° (227 x 160mm). Half-title, engraved title, woodcut diagrams, text within woodcut borders, large woodcut on final leaf. (Some marginal staining sometimes touching bottom margin of text, tear to bottom margin of final 5 leaves.) Later vellum, manuscript title on spine (some chipping and staining). Provenance : A. Stephanus Salandrus (ownership inscription). FIRST SEPARATE EDITION of al-Battani's ‘great work on astronomy... among the most excellent in Islamic astronomy’ (DSB). Al-Battani holds a place of honour among Islamic astronomers and historians and is considered one of the greatest Islamic astronomers. This is his principal work, the Kitab al-Zij , translated into Latin as De Scientia Stellarum by Plato of Tivoli in the first half of the twelfth century, on which his fame in both the East and West rests. He tested many of Ptolemy's results by fresh observations, and obtained more accurate values of the obliquity of the ecliptic and of precession. He improved the moon's mean motion in longitude, used signs and cosines, and introduced new and elegant solutions into spherical trigonometry. He measured the apparent diameters of the sun and moon and their variation, and concluded that annular solar eclipses must be possible. ‘The indebtedness of Copernicus to al-Battani is well known’, he is frequently quoted by Tycho Brahe and Riccioli, and his observations were of interest to Kepler and Galileo (DSB). The De Scientia Stellarum was first published in 1537 with Alfragani's Rudimenta astronomica . The present edition was the only other edition until Nallino's superb scholarly edition of 1899.