What did Guo Shoujing's Simplified Armillary Sphere look like?

Independently mounted equatorial coordinate ring set and horizontal coordinate ring set, eliminating the multi-layer nested ring structure of traditional armillary spheres. Equipped with crosshair sighting devices for improved aiming precision.

How did Guo Shoujing's Simplified Armillary Sphere work?

Equatorial ring: measures right ascension and declination → horizontal ring: measures altitude and azimuth → the two ring sets read independently without mutual interference → crosshair sighting eliminates parallax → precision reaches the arcminute level.

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郭守敬简仪

Guo Shoujing's Simplified Armillary Sphere

A simplification of the traditional armillary sphere that eliminated parallax errors caused by multiple nested rings. The highest-precision astronomical observation instrument of the medieval world.

郭守敬简

Scientific Principle

Instrument error elimination: separated ring sets avoid the inter-ring obstruction and parallax of traditional armillary spheres. Equatorial coordinate transformation.