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I wanted to put a link from Armilliary to Armillary sphere as well - because though not as widely used its a perfectly valid spelling I think. See [1]. But I can't work out how to add it, because the top part of the page with the title and bracketed part where it says 'redirected from' doesn't show up when I edited the page. I would be very appreciative if someone could show me how to do this.
Please notice that, in Chinese 渾儀 & 渾象 are different things.
渾儀 is that similar to western ones, with many rings to assist astronomers' observation.
渾象 is a big sphere with dots representing stars, to represent the circulation of Celestial sphere. (Some even big enough to let people get into it, and the "stars" are holes on the sphere, therefore the people can see spot of lights inside it. Just like the modern Planetarium dome)
This article mentions one modern method for creating hollow seamless spheres, rotational molding.
But I see a big problem with this claim that ancient Muslims produced hollow seamless metal spheres: there is only one source, an academic known as Emilie Savage-Smith. Research on the web shows she is the only primary researcher who holds this position and all other articles repeating her claim cite her alone. Many of these articles are posted on pro-Muslim websites which may be biased to incredulously accept the idea they had a now-lost method of making hollow seamless spheres.
Savage-Smith claims they used a "lost wax" casting method to create these seamless hollow spheres. This appears to be a clear engineering impossibility because, for this method of hollow casting, the inner melt-proof core must be held rigidly in place somehow, i.e. using at least one melt-proof rod attached to the outer mold. This will leave at least one hole in the sphere which must be filled in later, leaving at least one small circular seam behind. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost-wax_casting)
One such allegedly seamless hollow sphere was analyzed in the 1970s and determined to be a single metal casting, but the sphere was not full and indeed cameras were lowered through a "damaged" hole section in order to view inside. It should go without saying that there may have originally been a circular seam in the missing hole portion that was used to insert the cameras.
The Greek astronomer Hipparchus (c. 190 – c. 120 BC) credited Eratosthenes (276 –194 BC) as the inventor of the armillary sphere.[1][2][3][4][5][6] The name of this device comes ultimately from the Latin armilla (circle, bracelet), since it has a skeleton made of graduated metal circles linking the poles and representing the equator, the ecliptic, meridians and parallels????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
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???????????????????????????????????? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.70.58.206 (talk) 11:55, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I really like how you added a use and specific descriptions of the rings. Many older astronomy instrument pages proved the information and pictures, but do not inform the reader on how to use these instruments of give the reader any idea of it. Nguyen.mkhoa (talk) 19:10, 13 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The section on Chinese armillary spheres is mostly about celestial globes. Can this not be reduced in size? After all, the Greek section does not go on and on about celestial globes before mentioning the armillary sphere. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.232.62.242 (talk) 16:59, 10 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The caption for the second-to-last picture -- (the monochrome ["black and white"] picture that appears second to the right) -- in the subsection Armillary_sphere#Renaissance (within the Armillary_sphere#History section), says: "Portarait in the frontispiece of Antoine Crespin's Propheties par l'astrologue du treschrestien Roy de France et de Madame la Duchesse de Savoye, Lyon, France, 1572".
According to Google, (the Googlesearch engine, that is), it says that [the 5th letterof] the first "word" there, -- "Portarait" -- is probably a mistake.
This (the fact of the preceding paragraph) can be seen by doing a Plano vanilla Google search for [the character string] "Portarait". See, e.g., [the "search results" page] https://www.google.com/search?q=Portarait [URL 1] ... which contains [lines such as] << "Showing results for Portrait" >> and << "Search instead for Portarait" >>.
(However, there were about 142 results displayed -- with "omitted results" not included -- when I went to https://www.google.com/search?q=Portarait&nfpr=1 [...] [URL 2] (by clicking on [the last word of] "Search instead for Portarait" at [URL 1])[1] ... so, apparently, ... the misspelling "portarait" [if it is a misspelling] is pretty common.
Maybe not common enough to be notable, -- [!] -- ...but fairly common.)
Fixing this (minor) TYPO would [perhaps] be "a drop in the bucket" [small] relative to some of the other "room for improvement" opportunities that might exist with this article. However, I intend to fix it ... (by removing the 5th letter of the word^H^H^H^H character string "Portarait"), unless there is some good reason not to do so.
(Is there any such reason?) ("good" or otherwise) -- ? --
Agree with the need to reduce the general verbiage of the article but I still wanting to know what essentially it was used for ! 89.114.71.93 (talk) 15:40, 3 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
^Note: I think that the "nfpr=1" [substring] part of the URL, there (in [URL 2]) is the part that has a meaning of [something like] << "Yes, I really want to search for this exact character string, even though it might 'ordinarily' be considered to be (or, seem to be) a TYPO or other mistake." >>
Celestial globes are different from armillary spheres, and already have their own article. I think we can remove them from the history section, which is too long as is, especially the China section. Hi! (talk) 08:12, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Done. This is the most verbiage I have ever seen for a simple spelling error, but thank you for spotting that. Richard-of-Earth (talk) 18:22, 31 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
