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Giambattista Riccioli was a 17th century Italian Jesuit astronomer who made several important contributions to the field. He published the Almagestum novum in 1653, an astronomical encyclopedia that updated Ptolemy's work, and named lunar features after famous astronomers. In 1661, he published a work on geography and hydrography where he measured the length of a degree on Earth's surface, though his instrument and assumptions led to inaccurate results. His final work, Astronomia Reformata published in 1665, described astronomical instruments and contained planetary observations and tables on chronology, geography and stars.

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33 views2 pages

FCL 3

Giambattista Riccioli was a 17th century Italian Jesuit astronomer who made several important contributions to the field. He published the Almagestum novum in 1653, an astronomical encyclopedia that updated Ptolemy's work, and named lunar features after famous astronomers. In 1661, he published a work on geography and hydrography where he measured the length of a degree on Earth's surface, though his instrument and assumptions led to inaccurate results. His final work, Astronomia Reformata published in 1665, described astronomical instruments and contained planetary observations and tables on chronology, geography and stars.

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Mariana Mikaela Alagar
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Giambattista Riccioli

(April 17, 1598- June 25, 1671)


Brief History/Personal Background/Contributions to Science

 He was a Jesuit (A religious order of the Catholic Church), which meant that after the
condemnation of Galileo in 1633, he was responsible for defending the Church’s position denying
the motion of the earth. (This was when Copernicus had his theory of Heliocentrism – which is sun
is the center; in which all planets revolve around the sun. The church denied this because they
refused to believe that the sun was the center, when it contradicted the belief about humans being
God’s special creation, the Church rejected it. They believed in man being the center of all the
cosmos because of their belief being that man is the pinnacle/center of all creation – This being
said, that means that since man is on Earth, everything had to revolved around the Earth and thus
they believed in the Geocentric theory, where the Earth is in the center)
 He published the most up-to-date astronomical encyclopedia the Almagestum novum, which took
its name from the Almagest written by the great ancient (and geocentric) astronomer, Ptolemy.
 He was an Italian astronomer who started to name craters and mountains on the moon after
famous Astronomers
 In 1653, his first published work was the ‘Almagestum novum’, which is composed with treatise
on astronomy. In his work he mentions the origin of the science, and gives a list of those who had
cultivated it, he also describes his method of measuring a degree of the earth's surface, and a
pendulum of his own invention. He computes the obliquity of the ecliptic, the length of the tropical
year, and the elements of the orbits of the sun, moon, and planets. The work contains a treatise on
parallaxes, and some ideas of the writer concerning the body of the moon.
 In 1661, Riccioli published a work with P. Gramaldi on geography and hydrography, he had
carried on in order to determine the length of a degree of the terrestrial meridian. For this
purpose, a base-line was measured near Bologna, and a triangulation was formed between that
city and Modena. The stations appear however to have been improperly chosen, for the angles
between them are often less than eight degrees, and only two were observed in each triangle. The
instrument used for obtaining the terrestrial angles was similar to the parallactic rulers of
Ptolemy, and in reducing the distances between the stations to one spherical surface, Riccioli
assumed the refraction as constant, and equal to thirty minutes, as it had been determined by
Tycho Brahe for celestial bodies in the horizon.
 Lastly, in 1665, Riccioli published his ‘Astronomia Reformata,’ a work in which he treats of
refractions and parallaxes, and describes the instruments which he used to determine the places
of the stars. He also gives a collection of the observations previously made on the planets, and he
compares them with the astronomical tables which had then been published. The work concludes
with several tables relating to chronology, geography, and astronomy, and with a catalogue of
stars.

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