![]() Astronomy today is the scientific study of celestial objects and phenomena – stars, planets, the moon, comets, and eclipses. Scientists and thinkers in the Islamic world built on Babylonian, Greek, Indian and pre-Islamic Arabian sources translated into Arabic to make huge advances in the study of the heavens. Knowledge of the skies, now called astronomy, was an important aspect of Islamic culture from earliest times. ![]() The name is derived from the Greek astro labos (star-taker), which points to the fact that they were probably invented in ancient Greece, before being transmitted into the Islamic world from the 7th century AD onwards. In the 10th century, one astronomer estimated that there were around a thousand possible applications for an astrolabe, ranging from the position of the stars or the direction of Mecca to the height of a building. Astrolabes are complex devices which use several moving parts to turn raw data provided by the user into practical information – in many ways, they were the computers of their time, used to solve problems relating to the position of the sun, stars, planets and timekeeping. Before all this, however, was the astrolabe. Nowadays we have an abundance of devices, apps and other information which help us to know where we are, what time it is, and other essentials of everyday life.
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