In his tenth-century treatise, the *Book of Fixed Stars*, Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi undertook a systematic revision of Ptolemy's classical catalog. Al-Sufi did not merely translate the Greek coordinates; rather, he reconciled them with indigenous Arabic astronomical nomenclature and conducted independent observations to verify stellar magnitudes. Crucially, al-Sufi recognized that the brightness of stars, as recorded by Ptolemy, did not always align with contemporary observations, leading him to correct long-standing discrepancies. By superimposing Ptolemy’s grid onto his own celestial drawings, al-Sufi bridged the gap between two disparate scientific traditions. While his work was largely ignored in Western Europe for centuries, it became a cornerstone of observational astronomy in the Islamic world, preserving and expanding upon antiquity's scientific inheritance during a period when European science languished.
According to the passage, when revising Ptolemy’s classical star catalog, al-Sufi performed which of the following actions?
- Atranslating Greek star coordinates into Arabic names and assuming Ptolemy's magnitude calculations were correct
- merging Greek coordinates with traditional Arabic star names and personally observing the stars to confirm their brightnessAnswer
- Creplacing Ptolemy's coordinates with indigenous Arabic measurements after finding that the Greek calculations were entirely inaccurate
- Dfocusing exclusively on translating Greek terminology, leaving the verification of stellar brightness to contemporary observers in the Islamic world