Epicycles Explain Everything

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Before Copernicus and Newton, there was Ptolemy. He explained the way planets and stars move around in our sky by setting the earth at the center, and everything else outside in strange orbits. "Epicycles" were needed to explain the apparent forward and retrograde motion (back and forth) from the planets. If you put a planet in a circular orbit around a point, which itself orbits around the earth, you can explain the motion seen by an observer here on earth. It has actually been shown that, given enough epicycles, any pattern can be drawn.