History
The word planisphere (Latin planisferium) was originally used in the second century by Ptolemy to describe the representation of a spherical Earth by a map drawn in the plane. This usage continued into the Renaissance: for example Gerardus Mercator described his 1569 world map as a planisphere.
In this article the word describes the representation of the star-filled celestial sphere on the plane. The first star chart to have the name "planisphere" was made in 1624 by Jacob Bartsch. Bartsch was the son-in-law of Johannes Kepler, discoverer of Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
The calculating instrument was first described in the early 11th century by the Muslim Persian astronomer, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī.
Read more about this topic: Planisphere
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)