Daily Talk
The Rambam devotes the final chapter of the treatise to computing which way the crescent was tilted, and twice in the same chapter he tells you the figure does not matter and that his own numbers are not exact. Why close eighteen chapters of relentless precision with a calculation he openly declares approximate?
The Calculation That Decides Nothing
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About This Talk
Chapter 19 exists because the court asked the witnesses in which direction the crescent of the moon was inclined, and the Rambam explains how that answer can be calculated while stating at the outset, and again in the middle of his worked example, that his figures are approximate and of no consequence for the sighting itself. He begins with the tilt of the constellations against the equator, which crosses it only at the beginning of Aries and the beginning of Libra and reaches roughly twenty three and a half degrees at Cancer and at Sagittarius, gives the table of inclination from ten degrees to ninety, and folds every larger position back into that table by one of three subtractions. He then combines the inclination of the moon's degree with the moon's own first latitude, adding them where they agree and subtracting the smaller from the larger where they do not, works the night of the second of Iyar out to fourteen degrees north of the equator, and derives from that where the moon will appear and which way its horns will point, closing the entire treatise with the instruction that a student need not go searching for any of this in other books.