The first great attempt to make mapping realistic came in the second century A.D. with Claudius Ptolemy. He was an astronomer and astrologer obsessed with making accurate horoscopes, which ...

and astronomy would be better off if it had never existed … Ptolemy is not the greatest astronomer of history, but he is something still more unusual: he is the most successful fraud in the ...

Now researchers have managed to recover the text written by Ptolemy on a parchment that suffered such a previous recovery attempt. Outermost six rings of the meteoroscope, not to scale.