More than 1000 years before NASA's Hubble Space Telescope was sent into orbit to study the stars, a Muslim Persian astronomer had them thoroughly mapped. In world-first, a James Cook University PhD student has translated an ancient Arabic manuscript that is regarded as one of the most important medieval treatises on astronomy. Ihsan Hafez has researched the manuscript, the title of which translates as The Book of the Fixed Stars by the famous tenth century Iranian astronomer Abdul-Rahman al-Sufi. Al-Sufi's work, which includes detailed, colourful maps and descriptions of different constellations as well as an extensive star catalogue and star co-ordinates and magnitude estimates, dates from around AD 964. No one has ever made an English translation of the manuscript. Read more