Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c9.12

c9.12

8. That motion by which the fixed stars all appear to move eastward, and continually to increase their distance from the place, that the sun occupies at the vernal equinox, is known to the Brahmins, and enters into the composition of all their tables.⁷ They compute this motion to be at the rate of 54" a year; so that their *annus magnus*, or the time in which the fixed stars complete an entire revolution, is 24,000 years. This motion is too uick by somewhat less than 4" a year; an error that will not be thought great, when it is considered, that Ptolemy committed one of 14", in determining the same quantity.