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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nyeshet" data-source="post: 2534472" data-attributes="member: 18363">Aristotle did not have a defined distance for each of the crystal sphere; he just had the setup. Ptolomy came up with distances, but they tended to vary widely due to his 'circles within circles' type orbits - used to explain retrograde motion and some other anamolies. I suggest the following link: <a href="http://www.phys.uu.nl/~vgent/astro/almagestephemeris.htm" target="_blank">http://www.phys.uu.nl/~vgent/astro/almagestephemeris.htm</a>Playing with it for a while, I found that: - Beyond Saturn: the Sphere of Fixed Stars (starts ~20,000 earth radii away). - Saturn ranged from about 14,700 to 19,600 earth radii distant, ~17,150. - Jupiter ranged from 8,800 to 14,200 earth radii, ~11,500. - Mars ranged from 2,100 to 8,500 earth radii, ~5,300.- Sun ranged from 1,160 to 1,260 earth radii, ~1210. - Venus ranged from 160 to 1,170 earth radii, ~665. - Mercury ranged from 69 to 173 earth radii, ~121.- Moon ranged from about 54 to 66 earth radii distant, ~60. - The Earth, ~1.Do you notice how one 'Sphere' ends where another begins? That was devised on purpose. From what I read, Ptolomy noticed something like this between two of the 'spheres' (a parallax of merc-venus, I think) and decided such symetry was too perfect to be accidental, so he made the necessary adjustments here and there in his system until he had something that both gave more or less correct mechanics for the motions in the sky while also holding this 'symetry' of distances. It's not quite perfect, however. Note the gap between the Sun's sphere and Mars' sphere. Note the slight overlap in two instances (although I'll admit I was using the +10yr button a few times, and it was the perturbation of minor errors over centuries that eventually brought sufficient doubt to the Ptolomaic system as to allow the heliocentric theory a chance (at least prior to Kepler and Newton, who affectively nailed the lid shut on its coffin). Note also that Ptolomy did not have impenetrable crystal spheres. Instead he had lots of circles within circles that effectively made all the spheres semi-permiable and Nested within each other. (Saturn, for instance, had an equant in the Sphere of Mars! ) Also, each 'sphere' had two layers: a layer of fire ("above") and a layer of air ("below"). Also note that the earth itself was supposed to be four layers: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire (in ascending order). So the oceans definately had Earth below their watery surface - eventually. The continents, by corollary, must be viewed as islands sticking out of the sphere of Water-Earth. This 'sphere' of "Water-Earth" was then nested within the 'sphere' of Fire-Air. Perhaps he used heat haze to explain twinkling? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /> If you wish to make the other worlds inhabitable, they would have to be in the lower half of the equivalent sphere (in the air layer between the fire layer of the prior nested sphere and their own fire layer).</blockquote>

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