ANCIENT EGYPTIAN KNOWLEDGE.

Ancient Egyptians had a rich knowledge, since prehistoric times (5th BC), of the patterns and behaviors of the sky which permeated every aspect of their society. This knowledge led them to create a number of myths to explain the astronomical phenomena that played a considerable part in fixing dates of religious festivals and determining the hours of night. Trained priests were especially adept at watching the stars and observing the conjunctions and risings of the Sun, Moon, and planets, as well as the lunar phases. This is the reason why Egyptian gods and goddesses were so numerous and they are pictured in many paintings and murals.
Only certain gods were seen in the constellations, and others were represented by actual astronomical bodies.The constellation Orion, for instance, represented Osiris, who was the god of death, rebirth, and the afterlife. The Milky Way represented the sky goddess Nut giving birth to the sun god Ra. The stars were represented by the goddess of writing, Se'Shat, while the moon was either Toth, the god of wisdom, or Khons, a child moon god.
In the 3rd BC the observation of the horizon was extremely important, since it was here that the Sun appeared and disappeared daily. The Sun itself was represented by several gods, depending on its position. A rising morning Sun was Horus, the divine child of Osiris and Isis. The noon Sun was Ra because of its incredible strength. The evening Sun became Atum, the creator god who lifted pharaohs from the tombs to the stars. The red color of the Sun at sunset was considered to be the blood from the Sun as he died. After the Sun had set, it became Osiris, god of death and rebirth. In this way, night was associated with death and day with life or rebirth.
Egyptians grew in number and made the Nile River the center of its civilization, which flooded every year at the same time and provided rich soils for agriculture. Owing to the flood's own irregularity, the extreme precision of the Sirius star and the time of its return was very important to them. They named it Sopdet (meaning: Triangle), a goddess who was the guarantor of fertility over their land. The Egyptian priests, recognized that the flooding always occurred at the summer solstice, which was also when the bright star Sirius rose before the Sun. The priests, who were actually astronomers, were able to predict the annual flooding.
Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, is recorded in the earliest astronomical records. Its displacement from the ecliptic (the mean plane in the sky the Sun follows over a year), causes the star rising above the others in a remarkably regular basis compared to other stars, with a period exactly 365 days holding it constant in relation to the solar year. This occur at Cairo on July 19 (Julian), placing it just prior to the summer solstice and the onset of the annual flooding of the Nile.
The Egyptians continued to note the times of Sirius's annual return, which led them to discover the 1460-year Sothic cycle (Egyptian civil years of 365 days each or 1460 Julian years averaging 363 days each) and influenced the development of the Julian and Alexandrian calendars.
The Egyptian structures were built using astronomical orientation. The temples and pyramids were constructed in relation to the stars, zodiac, and constellations. In different cities, the structures had different orientations based on the specific beliefs of that place. For instance, some temples were built to align with a star that either rose or set at harvest or sowing time. Other structures were oriented toward the solstices or equinoxes.
As early as 4,000 BC, temples were built so precisely in its orientation that sunlight entered a room at only one precise time of the year. Another alternative building method was to gradually narrow successive doors into a specific room, in order to concentrate the sunbeams onto a god's image on the wall. The designs sometimes became quite complex. At the temple of Medinet Habu, there are actually two structures which are slightly off-kilter. It has been suggested that the second structure was built when the altitude of the other temple's orientation stars changed over a long period of time.
Their pyramids were carefully aligned towards the pole star (axis of rotation), and the temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak (meaning "fortified village"), a vast open site, was aligned on the rising of the midwinter Sun.
In Ptolemaic Egypt, after the death of Alexander the Great in 323BC, the Egyptian tradition merged with Greek and Babylonian astronomy, with the city of Alexandria in Lower Egypt becoming the centre of universal knowledge and activity across the Hellenistic world. Following the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the region came to be dominated by Arabic culture and Islamic astronomy.
Ybn Yunus, born in Egypt between 950-952 CE, became an important Egyptian Muslim astronomer.
His father, a historian, biographer, scholar of Islamic religious law,wrote 2 volumes about the history of Egypt. Ybn's father has been described as a prolific who became Egypt's most celebrated early historian and first known compiler of a biographical dictionary devoted exclusively to Egyptians. Ybn's works are noted for being ahead of time, and, like his father, having been based on meticulous calculations and attention to detail. He worked as an astronomer for the Fatimid Dynasty which came to power and the new city of Cairo was founded. In astrology, Ybn is noted for making predictions and having written a work concerning the heliacal risings of Sirius ("On attainment of Desire"), and on predictions concerning what day of the week the Coptic (Alexandrian calendar) year will start on. Ibn's most famous work in Islamic astronomy is a handbook of astronomical tables which contains very accurate observations expressing them without mathematical symbols. Ybn described 40 planetary conjunctions (Two objects have either same right ascension  or same ecliptic longitude observed from earth) and 30 lunar eclipses. For example, he accurately describes the planetary conjunction that occurred in the year 1000CE as follows: A conjunction of Venus and Mercury in Gemini, observed in the Western sky: "2 planets were in conjunction after sunset on the night of Sunday, May 19, 1000. The time was 8 equi-noctial hours after midday of Sunday ... Mercury was North of Venus and their latitude difference was a 3rd of a degree." Ybn's observations on conjunctions and eclipses were so accurate that they were used by the surveyor Richard Dunthorne, and the autodidactic Simon Newcombs' respective calculations of the secular acceleration of the moon.
In 1006CE, Ali ibn Ridwan, an Arab of Egyptian origin, observed a supernova (SN 1006), reaching an estimated 7.5 visual magnitude, and exceeding 16 times the brightness of Venus). He wrote: "the spectacle was a large circular body, 3 times as large as Venus. The sky was shining because of its light.
The intensity of its light was a little more than a quarter of that of Moon light." Ali ibn also noted that the new star was low on the Southern horizon. It was regarded as the brightest stellar event in recorded history, and Ali ibn left the most detailed description of it. Some astrologers of his time interpreted the event as a portent of plague and famine.
In the 14th CE, Najm al-Din al-Misri, from Egypt wrote a treaty describing over 100 different types of astronomical instruments, many of which he invented himself.
In the 20th CE, Farouk El-Baz from Egypt worked for NASA and was involved in the first Moon Landings (arrival of manned and unmanned robotic missions) with Apollo program, where he assisted in the explorations' plans of the Moon.