Since the beginning of time man has looked to the sky to observe what he saw there. Some have even tried to reason the patterns that were visible. The ancient Babylonians mostly ignored how it worked and merely followed and studied the paths the heavenly objects took. The ancient Greeks took that a step further. They wanted to know how the universe actually looked. Pythagoras was the first to set a blueprint to the extraterrestrial forms. He was followed by Plato and Aristotle. Finally, Ptolemy wrapped it up neatly to complete the model that stood for many years. Although his model is incomplete, Ptolemy based his ideas on the information and aesthetics of the time in which he lived. Pythagoras paved the way for astronomy by describing the universe and
how it all fit together. In about 600 B.C., Pythagoras created possibly the first model of the universe. It was geocentric which meant the objects in space revolved around the earth. In the model the earth and all the ethereal bodies were perfect spheres. They also traveled in perfect spheres. These beliefs stemmed directly from the idea of beauty in this time period. To account for the traditional motion of the planets, Pythagoras devised that the planets also orbited an epicenter that sometimes made them appear to be going backwards in the sky. The stars themselves were embedded in a perfect sphere that encompassed the entire universe as the ancient Greeks knew it.
Ptolemy altered the idea of the previous astronomers to fit more closely with his observations. Before this time it was believed
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