Originally published in 1908, this monograph by Sir Robert Stawell Ball (1840-1913) is a technical introduction to spherical astronomy.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

This volume of 12 studies, mainly published during the past 15 years, begins with an overview of the Islamic astronomy covering not only sophisticated mathematical astronomy and instrumentation but also simple folk astronomy, and the ways in which astronomy was used in the service of religion. It continues with discussions of the importance of Islamic instruments and scientific manuscript illustrations. Three studies deal with the regional schools that developed in Islamic astronomy, in this case, Egypt and the Maghrib. Another focuses on a curious astrological table for calculating the length of life of any individual. The notion of the world centred on the sacred Kaaba in Mecca inspired both astronomers and proponents of folk astronomy to propose methods for finding the qibla, or sacred direction towards the Kaaba; their activities are surveyed here. The interaction between the mathematical and folk traditions in astronomy is then illustrated by an 11th-century text on the qibla in Transoxania. The last three studies deal with an account of the geodetic measurements sponsored by the Caliph al-Ma'mûn in the 9th century; a world-map in the tradition of the 11th-century polymath al-Bîrûnî, alas corrupted by careless copying; and a table of geographical coordinates from 15th-century Egypt.

Spherical Astronomy provides a comprehensive treatment of the fundamental principles of positional astronomy. The text focuses on the principles of spherical astronomy and the theory of fundamental astronomical observations. Discussions are made on topics such as the celestial sphere and the nature of the reference systems of astronomy; the geometric aspects of the celestial sphere in relation to geographic position; systems of time measurement based on the rotation of the earth; and the inertial reference system. Astronomers and astrophysicists will find the book highly insightful.

This volume includes methodological considerations and descriptions of some of the texts compiled in The Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy (CETA), together with a number of pilot studies using these texts showing how the corpus can be used to investigate English Astronomy writing between 1700 and 1900, from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective.CETA is part of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC). Since the CC was designed in 2003 with a sampling method by which extracts of 10,000 words were selected, this method has been followed in CETA, with samples from 42 different authors both from Europe and North America. Some extralinguistic parameters, such as year of publication, sex, geographical provenance and text-types/genres have been considered for text selection. According to late Modern English text typology, the samples in CETA can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories, as well as some other metadata information, can be used to search the corpus. CETA, together with the Coruña Corpus Tool purpose-designed software by IrLab, was originally made available with the volume on CD-rom. As of early 2019, these are also accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña: CCT at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21850 and CETA at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21848