Reading Revolutions: Copernicus Part I

In my last post I remarked on how "radically strange--and yet strangely modern" I expected the 1543 work that kicked off the "scientific revolution" to be. Now that I've read the first two books of De Revolutionibus, I can say, boy was I right. This is the first of several posts about my experience of reading Nicholaus Copernicus in the original (er, translation). So first, let me point out the things I found "radically strange" about the work, with the "strangely modern" to come in the next post: Radically strange: Instructions for how to build an astrolabe. Vast tables of star locations, and huge tracts of astronomy/geometry that I didn't understand. I had never done this stuff before; I don't know how much some people get in high school, but I sure didn't get any. Eventually I Googled "obliquity of the ecliptic," and then everything became a lot more clear. ...