ASTRONOMY HAS MEANT DIFFERENT THINGS to different peoples, with each society regarding the night sky in its own way. In this issue, we explore contributions that several cultures have made to our collective appreciation and interpretation of the firmament. As writer Douglas MacDougal describes on page 24, the Babylonians were the first civilization to accurately track and record positions of the planets. They did so on a daily basis, giving rise to ephemerides (from the Latin ephemeris, diary) - tables that list the positions of celestial objects over time. Today, we compute ephemerides electronically, but their origin lies in calculations inscribed into cuneiform tablets beginning in the 7th century BC.
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