Ptolemy or optical factors and those caused by judgmental factors. He offered an obscure explanation of the sun or moon illusion (the enlarged apparent size on the horizon) based on the difficulty of looking upwards. There are several characters or items named after Ptolemy, including: [[File:Ptolemaeus - Quadripartitum, 1622 - 4658973.tif|thumb|"Quadripartitum", 1622]] [[Category:Ptolemy| ]] [[Category:100 births]] [[Category:170 deaths]] [[Category:1st-century Romans]] [[Category:2nd-century Romans]] [[Category:2nd-century philosophers]] [[Category:2nd-century poets]] [[Category:Egyptian calendar]] [[Category:Ancient Greek astrologers]] [[Category:Ancient Greek astronomers]] [[Category:Ancient Greek mathematicians]] [[Category:Ancient Greek music theorists]] [[Category:Astrological writers]] [[Category:Claudii]] [[Category:Egyptian astronomers]] [[Category:Egyptian mathematicians]] [[Category:Epigrammatists of the Greek Anthology]] [[Category:2nd-century people of Roman Egypt]] [[Category:Ancient Greek geographers]]
Egyptian astronomy in fixing the dates of religious festivals and determining the hours of night, and temple astrologers were especially adept at watching the stars and observing the conjunctions and risings of the Sun, Moon, and planets, as well as the lunar phases. In Ptolemaic Egypt, the Egyptian tradition merged with Greek astronomy and Babylonian astronomy, with the city of Alexandria in Lower Egypt becoming the centre of scientific activity across the Hellenistic world. Roman Egypt produced the greatest astronomer of the era, Ptolemy (90-168 CE). His works on astronomy, including the Almagest, became the most influential books in the history of