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The Ulugh Beg Observatory is an observatory in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Built in the 1420s by the Timurid astronomer Ulugh Beg, it is considered by scholars to have been one of the finest observatories in the Islamic world.〔Science in Islamic civilisation: proceedings of the international symposia: "Science institutions in Islamic civilisation", & "Science and technology in the Turkish and Islamic world"()〕 Some of the famous Islamic astronomers who worked at the observatory include Al-Kashi, Ali Qushji, and Ulugh Beg himself. The observatory was destroyed in 1449 and rediscovered in 1908. ==History and astronomical equipment== In 1420, the great astronomer Ulugh Beg built a madrasah in Samarkand, named the Ulugh Beg Madrasah. It became an important centre for astronomical study and only invited scholars to study at the university whom he personally approved of and respected academically and at its peak had between 60 and 70 astronomers working there. In 1424, he began building the observatory to support the astronomical study at the madrasah and it was completed five years later in 1429. Beg assigned his assistant and scholar Ali Qushji to take charge of the Ulugh Beg Observatory which was called Samarkand Observatory at that time. He worked there till Ulugh Beg was assassinated.〔Osmanlı imparatorluğunun doruğu 16. yüzyıl teknolojisi, Editor Prof. Dr. Kazım Çeçen, Istanbul 1999, Omaş ofset A.Ş.〕 Other notable astronomers made observations of celestial movements at the observatory, including Qāḍīzāda al-Rūmī and Jamshid Kashani. However, the observatory was destroyed by religious fanatics in 1449 and was only re-discovered in 1908, by a Uzbek-Russian archaeologist from Samarkand named V. L. Vyatkin, who discovered an endowment document that stated the observatory's exact location.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Samarqand )〕 While working at the excavation site, Vyatkin found one of the most important astronomical instruments used at the observatory: a large arch that had been used to determine midday.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Observatories in Islamic History )〕 A trench of about 2 metres wide was dug in a hill along the line of the Meridian and in it was placed the arc of the instrument. Today, there is a circular base showing the outline of the original structure and the doorway leads to the remaining underground section of the Fakhrī sextant that is now roofed over. The sextant was 11 metres long and once rose to the top of the surrounding 3 storey structure although it was kept underground to protect it from earthquakes. Calibrated along its length, it was the world's largest 90 degree quadrant at the time, with a radius of 40.4 metres.〔 The radius of the meridian arc was according to a trusted middle age Turkish astronomer approximately 50 metres and was said to be the same height as the dome of the Hagia Sofia mosque in Istanbul. It was used for the observation of the Sun, Moon and other celestial bodies, and along with other sophisticated equipment such as an armillary and an astrolobe, the astronomers working in Samarkand could determine noon every day according to the meridional height of the Sun, distance from the zenith and declination. By 1437, scholarly studies using the observatory had updated the Ilkhanic Tables which had previously been observed in the 1260s and 1270s at the Maragheh observatory, which provided valuable sine and tangent tables, and the Zij-i Sultani, which displayed improved planetary parameters and the plotting of the coordinates of 1,018 star positions based on some original research at the observatory rather than purely being an update of the work of Ptolemy or al-Sufi. In fact, Ulugh Beg and his scholars had computed many inaccuracies in their work as he explained in his preface under the heading "Determination of the Places of the Fixed Stars in Longitude and Latitude": These discoveries and research conducted at Ulugh Beg Observatory were very important at the time as astronomers could predict eclipses and calculate the hour of the rising sun and altitude of a celestial body, and meant their hypothesis of a stellar year was rather accurate, at 365 days, 6 hours, 10 minutes and 8 seconds, only about 1 minute longer than the modern electronic calculations. Although the observatory was destroyed in 1449, scholarly astronomical study continued in Samarkand for some 75 years. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ulugh Beg Observatory」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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