What astronomical instrument was used in Classical Antiquity and through the medieval Islamic world, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance by astronomers, navigators, and astrologers to locate and predict the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars, determine local time or latitude, for surveying and to cast horoscopes?
Astrolabe Astrolabe An astrolabe ( "astrolabos"; "al-Asturlāb"; "Akhtaryab") is an elaborate inclinometer, historically used by astronomers and navigators to measure the inclined position in the sky of a celestial body, day or night. The word astrolabe means "the one that catches the heavenly bodies." It can thus be used to identify stars or planets, to determine local latitude given local time (and vice versa), to survey, or to triangulate. It was used in classical antiquity, the Islamic Golden Age, the European Middle Ages and the Age of Discovery for all these purposes. The astrolabe's importance not only comes from the early
Astronomy in the medieval Islamic world ibn al-Shatir. Several forms of quadrants were invented by Muslims. Among them was the sine quadrant used for astronomical calculations, and various forms of the horary quadrant, used to determine time (especially the times of prayer) by observations of the sun or stars. A center of the development of quadrants was ninth-century Baghdad. The Equatorium is an Islamic invention from Al-Andalus. The earliest known was made in the 11th century. It is a mechanical device for finding the positions of the moon, sun, stars and planets, without calculation using a geometrical model to represent the celestial body's mean and anomalistic