On the Apparent Magnitude of the Sun when Low and High

I reasoned that this must happen in the same proportion as stars are diminished and vanish when light approaches. They reappear whenever darkness surrounds the sight, not only at night, but even at midday from the bottom of a deep well, or during the shadow caused by the interposition of the Moon Gassendi refers to a solar eclipse. The mention of seeing stars from a well at midday was a common belief in antiquity and the seventeenth century, though modern optics suggests it is largely a myth.. It should be noted that, although the Moon appears smaller to the eye during the day than it does at night, it still appears larger than it truly is by nearly an eighth of its diameter. I have confirmed this through a mechanical instrument: likely a quadrant or a sighting tube, which is not subject to as many deceptions as the eye.

VII. Regarding your request for certain observations for the illustrious Scipione Chiaramonti (1565–1652) was an Italian philosopher and astronomer. He was a staunch defender of Aristotelian cosmology against the findings of Tycho Brahe and Galileo. Scipio Chiaramonti, I am ready to provide them once it is clear which kind he desires. To transcribe every observation I have in my notebooks would take more than a year. Furthermore, these notes are currently bare, because I have not yet had the leisure to add mathematical calculations to them, except in a very few instances. Content for now simply to record and write them down, I wait for an opportunity to reduce them to numerical tables. This is a task that can be performed just as well even after thousands of years.

I would like you to convey this to him, and at the same time express my readiness to serve his needs. Whether he desires records of eclipses of the Sun, the Moon, or the stars; or perhaps the elongations: the angular distance between a planet and the Sun, stations, oppositions, quadratures: a configuration where two celestial bodies are ninety degrees apart, or other phenomena; let him simply choose, and I will share them. Farewell, my dear Gabriel Naudé (1600–1653) was a French scholar and librarian. He was a close friend of Gassendi and a prominent figure in the intellectual circles of the seventeenth century. Naudé, and continue to hold me in your affection. Written at original: "Aquis Sextiis" Aix-en-Provence, on the Nones of December: the 5th day of the month in the Roman calendar, 1636.