STÖFFLER, Johannes and PITATI, Pietro

An expanded and beautiful edition of the almanac by Johannes Stöffler. As with all books of this kind, it had a wide circulation, but complete copies are rare and sought after. The volume provides the positions of stars at regular intervals of date and time, through detailed tables of value. It includes five introductive treatises on astronomic rules and phenomena, along with the celestial calculations from 1551 up to 1555, all by Pietro Pitati. Stöffler (1452-1531) was a German mathematician, astronomer and priest. He invented some astronomical instruments and taught at the University of Tübingen. Embracing the timespan 1499-1551, his celestial calculations continued those by Regiomontanus (1436-1476) and exerted a paramount influence over contemporary astronomical and astrological knowledge. The sixteenth-century Italian scholar Pietro Pitati was a professor of astronomy in Verona. The book is dedicated to the city bishop and prominent cardinal Gian Matteo Giberti. Pitati’s ephemerides published in Venice in 1542 are regarded as the earliest Italian publication of this genre. He kept publishing his calculation up to the year 1562. In his Compendium super annua solaris (1560), he put forward for the first time the idea of omitting the Julian leap day in three out of four centennial years, so to keep the calendar in line with the solar year. Rare.