(939 or 940–998), the author of a voluminous treatise on astronomy also known as the Almagest, which contained some new ideas and was written on a different plan from Ptolemy's book, of which it has sometimes been supposed to be a translation. In discussing the theory of the moon Abul Wafa found that, after allowing for the equation of the centre and for the evection, there remained a further irregularity in the moon's motion which was imperceptible at conjunction, opposition, and quadrature, but appreciable at the intermediate points. It is possible that Abul Wafa here detected an inequality rediscovered by Tycho Brahe (chapter v., § 111) and known as the variation, but it is equally likely that he was merely restating Ptolemy's prosneusis (chapter ii., § 48).[1] In either case Abul Wafa's discovery appears to have been entirely ignored by his successors and to have borne no fruit. He also carried further some of the mathematical improvements of his predecessors.
Another nearly contemporary astronomer, commonly known as Ibn Yunos (?–1008), worked at Cairo under the patronage of the Mahometan rulers of Egypt. He published a set of astronomical and mathematical tables, the Hakemite Tables, which remained the standard ones for about two centuries, and he embodied in the same book a number of his own observations as well as an extensive series by earlier Arabian astronomers.
61. About this time astronomy, in common with other branches of knowledge, had made some progress in the Mahometan dominions in Spain and the opposite coast of Africa. A great library and an academy were founded at Cordova about 970, and centres of education and learning were established in rapid succession at Cordova, Toledo, Seville, and Morocco.
The most important work produced by the astronomers of these places was the volume of astronomical tables published under the direction of Arzachel in 1080, and known as the Toletan Tables, because calculated for an observer at Toledo, where Arzachel probably lived. To
