Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c9.101

c9.101

The argument of this equation is the difference between the mean longitude of the sun and of the planet. The orbits are supposed circular; but whether the inequality in question was understood to arise from the motion of the earth, or from the motion of the planet in an epicycle, the centre of which revolves in a circle, is left undetermined, as both hypotheses may be so adjusted as to give the same result with respect to this inequality. The proportional distances of the planets from the earth or the sun, may be deduced from the tables of these equations, and are not far from the truth.