n with the ecliptic and subject to absolutely no
motions, but at such a distance from the center of the earth
that the semidiameter of the earth has little, if any,
proportion with the distance of the solar epicycle from the
earth. Around the sun, moving continually in this epicycle (its
immobile palace) through the degrees of the anomaly, you can
revolve, with motions proportionate to the system, the five
planets: Mercury and Venus (the nearest barons of the sun),
then Mars, Jupiter and, most remote, Saturn, with its
respective satellites, etc., eccentrically surrounding the
earth itself and the moon in their immense ambit and wandering
by their proper motions through the zodiac.

Nevertheless, not far from the earth you should imagine
fabricated, as from most refined crystal, the heaven of the
moon everywhere equidistant from the center of the earth and
revolving separately on the same poles (prolonged even to this
place) on which the Primum Mobile and the heaven of the fixed
stars revolve. In the middle of this, that is, in some point
equally removed from the poles, you place the center of the
lunar epicycle, movable also by the common rotation of the
lunar heaven. I refrain from the other movements of the moon in
latitude, etc., as also those of the five planets, etc., which
the theory in no way excludes, lest by a variety of congested
motions explained too abundantly, either you might be confused
about the fundamental concept of the system or, while adorning
the theory and trying to embellish the least things more
widely, you might reject also the things which are capital.

Here you already have the whole machine, but still inert and to
be animated for the first time by motions accommodated to the
system. Nevertheless, before I assign motion to the individual
parts of the world, so that the thing might later appear more
clearly to you, I arrange all things thus: first, as if by
hand, I turn the Primum Mobile until the Boreal magnetic point
comes to the level or the area of the semicircle described in
the supreme immobile convexity; then I turn the heaven of the
fixed stars until, for example, the heel of Castor (a star of
the third magnitude), almost in the ecliptic and indeed in our
time not far distant from the solstitial colure,