What a wonderful question! The simple answer is that they relied on centuries of previous observations. Remember, even computers have to be programmed with the right data to produce future times of ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A new study of the Dresden Codex uncovers how Maya astronomers predicted solar eclipses for centuries using simple math and ...

Seleucus of Seleucia was an ancient astronomer who defended heliocentrism, arguing that Earth orbits the Sun and rotates on ...

Before telescopes, ancient Greek astronomers relied on naked-eye observations of the night sky to understand the universe around them. The meticulous star catalog belonging to one of the best of these ...

For more than a century, astronomers debated the possibility of martian canali (channels) which Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli claimed to see on the Red Planet in 1877. Mistranslated into ...

More than a thousand years ago, astronomers from the Maya civilization developed one of the most sophisticated time-keeping systems in the ancient world—a system that could predict solar eclipses for ...