Giovanni Battista Riccioli · 1651
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The Almagestum Novum (Bologna, 1651) is the great Jesuit encyclopedia of seventeenth-century astronomy. Its author, Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671), took its name from Ptolemy’s ancient masterpiece and aimed to do for his own age what the Almagest did for antiquity: to set out the whole of astronomy as it then stood.
This first part, Books I to VII, covers the sphere and the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, eclipses, the fixed stars and the five planets. It opens with Riccioli’s preface, his indexes, and a double chronicle of the astronomers who came before him.
This part contains the map of the Moon that Riccioli drew with his colleague Francesco Maria Grimaldi. Its names for the craters and seas, among them Tycho, Copernicus, Plato and the Sea of Tranquility, are the names astronomers still use.
The source is the Bologna printing of 1651. The second part of the first volume, with the comets, the systems of the world and the 126 arguments on the Earth’s motion, is a separate volume. Riccioli’s later Astronomia Reformata is also in this collection.