Countries of Islam
The next period of the development of astronomy is associated with the activities of scientists from the countries of Islam — al-Battani, al-Biruni, Abu'l-Hassan ibn Yunis, Nasir al-Din at-Tusi, Ulugbek, Al-Ferghani and many others.Europe
In the Middle Ages, European astronomers were mainly engaged in observations of the visible movements of the planets, coordinating them with the accepted geocentric system of Ptolemy. Interesting cosmological ideas can be found in the writings of Origen of Alexandria, a prominent apologist of early Christianity, a disciple of Philo of Alexandria. Origen urged to take the Book of Genesis not literally, but as a symbolic text. The universe, according to Origen, contains many worlds, including inhabited ones. Moreover, he admitted the existence of many Universes with their own stellar spheres. Each universe is finite in time and space, but the process of their origin and death is endless. In the XI—XII centuries, the main scientific works of the Greeks and their Arabic-speaking students were translated into Latin. The founder of Scholasticism Albert the Great and his disciple Thomas Aquinas dissected the teachings of Aristotle in the XIII century, making it acceptable to the Catholic tradition. From that moment on, the Aristotle-Ptolemy world system actually merges with Catholic dogma. The experimental search for truth was replaced by a method more familiar to theology — the search for suitable quotations in canonized writings and their lengthy commentary. The revival of scientific astronomy in Europe began on the Iberian Peninsula, at the junction of the Arab and Christian worlds. At first, the ziji treatises that penetrated from the Arab East played a decisive role. In the second half of the XI century, Arab astronomers gathered in the Cordova Caliphate under the leadership of az-Zarqali (Arzakhel) compiled the Toledo tables. The auxiliary tables for calculating eclipses in the Toledo Tables are almost entirely borrowed from Zij al-Khorezmi and al-Battani, who developed Ptolemy's theory and refined its outdated parameters on the basis of new more accurate measurements. In the XII century, thanks to Gerard of Cremona, the tables penetrated into the Latin world and were adapted to the Christian calendar (Toulouse tables). In 1252-1270, in the already Christian Toledo, under the patronage of King Alphonse X the Wise of Leon and Castile, Jewish astronomers Isaac Ben Sid and Yehuda ben Moshe compiled more accurate Alphonsine tables. Shortly before 1321, work on improving these tables continued in Paris. The result of this centuries-old work of generations of astronomers from different countries and peoples was printed in 1485 as the first edition of the Alphonsine Tables.