Equant

Okay kiddo, imagine you and your friends are playing a game of catch. You throw the ball to your friend, and she throws it back to you. But sometimes, the ball doesn't come back to you in a straight line. It seems to curve away from you sometimes.

That's kind of like what the ancient astronomers discovered about the way the planets move through the sky. They were trying to figure out why the planets sometimes moved faster or slower across the sky, and why they sometimes seemed to move backwards for a little while.

One astronomer named Ptolemy came up with a clever idea to explain this. He imagined that each planet moved around the Earth in a circle, but that the center of the circle wasn't at the Earth. Instead, it was at a point called the "equant". This point was off to the side of the Earth, not in the center.

Now, imagine you and your friend are playing catch again. But this time, you're wearing roller skates! You're moving as you throw the ball, so it doesn't go straight to your friend anymore. But if you could stand still on the equant point, you could throw the ball so it would always go straight to your friend. She wouldn't see it curving away from her anymore.

That's kind of what Ptolemy was doing with his equant idea. From the Earth's perspective, the planets seemed to move in weird patterns. But from the equant point, they moved in nice, regular circles. So Ptolemy imagined that the planets actually moved in circles around the equant, and not around the Earth.

Of course, we now know that the planets don't actually move in circles around the Earth, or the equant point. They actually move in elliptical orbits around the Sun. But Ptolemy's idea helped astronomers make sense of the movements they saw in the sky, and it was an important step in our understanding of the universe.