How did the ancient Greek affect astronomy today?

Answer 1

For the most part, astronomy played little part in the daily lives of the ancient Greeks. Of course, those people would not have thought of themselves as "Greek", because there was no nation called "Greece". "Hellas" was just a geographic description, and the people were Athenians, or Spartans, or Corinthians or Ionians, or Lacedaemonians or Peloponnesians as subjects of one or another of the quasi-independent and often warring city-states.

Of course, the average person knew little of this either, being focused on his farm, or his sheep, or his fishing nets. In our modern society, all of our food is grown or raised by about 15% of the population, making it possible for the other 85% of the population to make things, or transact business, or write, or play games. Back then, 99% of the people were involved in basic agriculture and procurement of food, and only the kings and generals and their families were able to eat without worrying about where the food came from.

But except for the navigators of the fishing vessels, astronomy was a very tiny part of their lives, and limited to elaborating and retelling the mythical tales of the heroes and monsters who were arrayed in the skies above them. Those heroes and monsters are still known to us today, as the constellations in the night sky.

Answer 2

The Mayans did not have any complex instruments for charting the positions of celestial objects, so their observations were with the naked eye. They may have used rudimentary instruments, such as crossed sticks to chart position, but they lacked the armillary spheres or sextants of other civilizations.

However, the Mayans were excellent builders and many of their temples and buildings are aligned to help observers monitor position. For example, many buildings pointed towards the equinoxes or midsummer, whilst other buildings had doorways and windows aligned with the most northerly or southerly rising of Venus, one of the most important celestial bodies to the Mayan culture. So accurate were their observations that their predictions of the orbit of Venus lost only two hours in a 584-day cycle.

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The Ancient Greeks encountered the great civilization of Mesopotamia as early as the 11th Century BCE, as they settled along the coast of Turkey. They also encountered the Persians and the Egyptians, absorbing customs and knowledge from these great cultures. As a maritime people, the Greeks understood the value of reading the stars as an aid to navigation and, by the 6th Century, Ancient Greek seafarers of the Ionian culture could read the stars like a map, and understood the patterns and motions of the celestial sphere. Greek astronomy might have ended there were it not for the rise of the Greek philosophers. Their insatiable quest to understand the undercurrents that drove the universe, and read the ebb and flow of natural cycles governing the earth and heavens became an obsession. The Greeks developed a pantheon of Gods, mainly because of cross-fertilization from Eastern cultures, but they were not satisfied with purely theological explanations for phenomena, and wanted to understand how and why things worked.

Perhaps they saw their theories as reading the mind of the gods and revealing what they believed to the perfection of nature. To the Greeks, the universe was a machine that ran upon mechanical and mathematical principles, which could be deduced through logic and reasoning.

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Answer 3

every culture viewed the heavens in different ways, the Greeks added a lot and built the first stones in science

Answer 4

it helped us understand the stars and planets better

Answer 5

Actually, it did. It has been a long time since the great Greek peak of Philosophy

and Science, and we are way ahead of where they were in Astronomy.