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Who made it?

Who made it?

Once again there is no hard evidence identifying a particular maker. It is thought by some that it was probably made by someone of the Hipparchos school. Hipparchos (c.190 BC – c.120 BC) was a Greek, astronomer, geographer, and mathematician of the Hellenistic period. Hipparchos was probably born in Nicaea (now Iznik, Turkey), and probably died on the island of Rhodes. He is known to have been a working astronomer at least from 147 BC to 127 BC. Hipparchos is considered the greatest astronomical observer and, by some, the greatest overall astronomer of antiquity. He was the first Greek to develop quantitative and accurate models for the motion of the Sun and Moon. For this he made use of the observations and knowledge accumulated over centuries by the Ancient Babylonians. Amongst the many works of Hipparchos, is his development of a quantitative geometrical model for the first anomaly of the Moon’s motion. It has been recently shown by the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project that the Antikythera Mechanism includes an ingenious mechanical realization of this model. Furthermore, Hipparchos is credited with the invention or improvement of several astronomical instruments, which were used for a long time for naked-eye observations. As such it is very tempting to associate Hipparchos as the maker of the Mechanism, especially as he was contemporaneous with date of manufacture of the Mechanism (150 to 100 BC).

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