Some remarks on Islamic astronomical instruments

Abstract

SUMMARY: Islamic astronomical instruments bear witness to a tradition of over one thousand years of serious activity in astronomy in the Muslim world. Even some of the earliest and most important of these instruments are only now being catalogued, and many treatises on the construction and use of these instruments remain unstudied. Also many late instruments are the sole surviving evidence of earlier developments in instrumentation. The most popular instrument was the astrolabe, to which Muslim astronomers developed numerous improvements and modifications. In this paper other kinds of instruments will also be discussed. The available corpus of medieval Islamic instruments represents a mine of material of interest to historians of science, of technology and of art.