The gravitational influence of Jupiter on the Ptolemaic value for the eccentricity of Saturn
It was shown by the author and \textit{G. L. Recio} [ibid. 73, No. 1, 39--124 (2019; Zbl 1408.01002)] that the eccentricities found for Mars and Jupiter by Ptolemy's method were within 1.5\% of the values computed using Kepler's first and second laws. Saturn, however, was an exception, with an error exceeding 5\%. The author now shows that, given that ``the gravitational influence of Jupiter on Saturn produces, among other things, changes in its eccentricity, an influence that is negligible for most planets, ``the value that Ptolemy obtained is a good approximation of the real eccentricity -- including the perturbation of Jupiter -- which Saturn had during the time of Ptolemy's ostensible planetary observations. This also shows that ``the observations used for obtaining the eccentricity of Saturn were done near Ptolemy's time, and rather unlikely earlier than the first century AD. Based on this hypothesis, one can also discard ``the idea that Ptolemy borrowed values or observations from astronomers further back than the first century AD, such as Hipparchus or the Babylonians.
- Mean motions in Ptolemy's \texit{Planetary hypotheses}
- The Inner Planets and the Keplerian Revolution
- Kepler's hypothesis vicaria
- The Great Martian Catastrophe and how Tycho (Re-)fixed it
- Rounding numbers: Ptolemy's calculation of the Earth-Sun distance
- Ptolemy's Planetary Mean Motions Revisited
- Epicycles, eccentrics, and ellipses: The predictive capabilities of Copernican planetary models
- Kepler's derivation of the bisection of the Earth's orbit in \textit{Astronomia nova}
- The treatment of observations in early astronomy
- A likely source of an observation report in Ptolemy's \textit{Almagest}
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