? What were Ancient Greek and Romans seeing in the sky with the naked eye then?
Lots of people saw it before him. Apparently he (supposedly) just happened to never see it.
Strangely his Wikipedia page says he made 3 observations of Mercury.
Copernikus wrote in De revolutionibus:
„The planet tortured us with many riddles and great hardship as we explored its wanderings“.
So he observed him for three times, but it wasn’t easy.
But look at the wording in the title. “Not even Copernicus”. Like seeing Mercury is something extremely out of the ordinary.
to me it reads as if nobody has ever seen mercury and somehow copernicus was the only person who would have had the chance lol
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The so-called heliocentric “theory” is an artifice of someone who, having sour grapes for never seeing Mercury IRL, found some shitty excuse to blame his failures on the sky. /s
Serious now. I’m sceptic on the claim, that Copernicus never saw Mercury. Sure, he wouldn’t need it for his theory, but he was still interested and curious about the sky. Mercury is a pain to observe but definitively doable, and you get, like, eight good chances per year, that can be predicted with geocentric ephemerides. His best bets would be Jan-Mar (drier than other months in Poland, so there’s a bit less mist).
