Abstract
It has long been known that until the middle of the seventeenth century the height of the atmosphere was derived from considerations of twilight.1 The method for this was first presented in an Arabic treatise composed by Ibn Mucadh extant only in Latin and Hebrew versions. The Latin version was first published in 1542,2 and was quite influential in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The height of the atmosphere was particularly important for determining atmospheric refraction, but the method introduced by Ibn Mucadh ultimately proved unsatisfactory, and his result (that the atmosphere is about 50 miles high) was then abandoned.
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