Used with
permission of Maiken Naylor, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA,
http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/sel/exhibits/stamps
Ptolemy (2nd century AD) was a famous astronomer, mathematician and geographer whose geocentric view of the universe was dogma in western thought until 1200 years later, when Copernicus was able to offer a competing heliocentric model which accounted just as well for many of its inconsistencies with observations. Ptolemy synthesized and extended the star catalogue of Hipparchus and much of Greek astronomy in his Almagest.