A planetarium may be considered a “House of Star Science”, where a person may seek knowledge of the universe and contemplate the place of humankind in its vastness. One distinctive more..

features of this medium is the contemporaneous involvement of the human sensors of sight, sound and mind. Therefore, there is an education mission for each planetarium to accomplish and, subsequently, a need for updating the state of knowledge. This requires not only constant surveys of recent discoveries in the field, but also regular communication with institutions that provide similar services worldwide. For this reason I applaud the initiative of the International Planetarium Society and its 2010 Conference at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina – the resurrection of an ancient store of universal knowledge. As a geologist and veteran of NASA’s program of lunar exploration, my intention is to convey to participants of this conference some examples of the reasons for the unequal success of Apollo. The most critical reason being that it was a program with a grand objective that everyone could understand, and a very specific time table: “To send a man to the Moon and bring him safely to the Earth within a decade.” This motivated all participants in the project to absolute limits. This motivation, in large part, assured the superb accomplishments of the momentous endeavor. In the post-Apollo era, IMAX presents an example of following up an idea and assuring its utility in scientific education of the masses in an entertaining way. It is a story of an innovation that was supported by a promoter, and implemented by a visionary public educator. That implementation occurred during my tenure as research director of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. The influence of such an endeavor on science for the lay person was enormous, and deserves study and emulation. Today, we are very lucky to witness a steady stream of astronomical discoveries by the Hubble Space Telescope. This great instrument has expanded our knowledge of the universe many fold. Its results will surely influence the topics to be dealt with by planetaria worldwide. One of our future objectives should be to establish a mechanism to bring to the general public the results of its discoveries in near real-time. In so doing we would expand the knowledge and heighten the interest of younger generations. This would assure that they would continue the quest for knowledge of our vast and fascinating universe.

This illustrated talk will focus on the role that was played by the Arabic/Islamic astronomical tradition in critiquing the more ancient Greek tradition, not because this earlier more..

tradition was simply Greek but because it was found to have violated the very scientific principles it claimed to have been based upon. In a systematic and exhaustive manner, almost every parameter upon which the Greek astronomical tradition was based was subjected to a very thorough scrutiny. Whether it was the inclination of the ecliptic, the position of the solar apogee, the rate of precession, the solar eccentricity, the solar equation, or the more complex planetary motions, each and every one of those fundamental concepts were found to be poorly articulated in the Greek tradition. The critique even encompassed the very methodology and the instruments and the manner in which those methods and instruments were used in the Greek tradition to determine the fundamental astronomical parameters in that tradition. With the passage of time, and as the critique deepened, a sense of rebellion started to emerge, and a serious search began to be pursued with the sole purpose of finding an astronomy that could replace the Greek one. By the fifth century AH (the eleventh AD), the astronomers who were involved in this enterprise began to produce one alternative astronomy after another, and persisted to do so well into the tenth century AH (sixteenth century AD) as we can now fully document. From a purely theoretical perspective, this talk will demonstrate that the best astronomical works that were almost exclusively produced in Arabic were in fact the very best and most sophisticated astronomical works that were ever produced in the Islamic culture, during a period most people characterize as a period of decline in Islamic culture. The talk will offer the counter argument with ample illustrated proof to the effect that the Islamic astronomical tradition was mostly a rebellion against the Greek tradition, rather than a preservation of it as we are often told, and by its very rebellion offered the theoretical mathematical foundation upon which the later European astronomy of the Renaissance was eventually based. With reference to Arabic and Latin manuscripts, the talk will illustrate the manner in which European Renaissance astronomers intricately manipulated the mathematical and astronomical results that were first developed within the Islamic culture so that they could embed those results in their own Latin works, and thus lay the foundation for what was later called the emergence of modern astronomy. On the cultural level, the lecture will demonstrate the universal character of the Islamic astronomical tradition as it moved freely from an early intercultural critique of earlier Persian, Sanskrit and Greek traditions, to a constructive scientific engagement with the emerging astronomy of the European Renaissance.