identifiy one contribution to astronomy made by the islamic culture?

[Haidi M]

which dominated much of the world during the middle age?

[jjillylilly]

The Persians were once the most civilized and scientific people on earth. And their descendants don't do too badly either http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_and_Persian_astrology

See "The 13th Warrior" sometime

[Michael Steen]

How about the names of almost all the stars?? Mizar, Arcturus, Aldeberan, Rigel, etc. etc.
Do you remember the movie Ben Hur? Do you remember the names of the four horses that drove his chariot? Look them up!

[Alpharion6]

Islam is a religion. Not a place. The islamic faith reaches from Africa to the Middle East and Asia. It can include Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and India. Though referred to as a different name, Islam and Christian faiths believe in the same god.

Islamic (Arabic) astronomy between the 8th-16th centuries included Indian, Sassanid and Hellenistic works which had a significant influence on Indian and European astronomy as well as Chinese astronomy.

A significant number of stars in the sky, such as Aldebaran and Altair - navigational stars used to construct navigational instruments, and astronomical terms such as alhidade, azimuth, and almucantar, are still today recognized with their Arabic names.

A large corpus of literature from Islamic astronomy remains today, numbering approximately 10,000 manuscripts scattered throughout the world.

Islamic astronomy laid the foundation for spherical geometry.

They triangulated the vertices of zenith, the north celestial pole, and the sun's position to calculate the time of day. They constructed a calendar.

Muhammad ibn Jabir al-Harrani al-Battani (853-929) calculated lengths for the solar year and sidereal year, prediction of eclipses, and wrote works on the phenomenon of parallax.

In the 9th century, Jafar Muhammad ibn Musa ibn Shakir made significant contributions to astrophysics and celestial mechanics by being the first to hypothesize that the heavenly bodies and celestial spheres are subject to the same laws of physics as Earth, unlike the ancients who believed that the celestial spheres followed their own set of physical laws different from that of Earth. In his Astral Motion and The Force of Attraction, Muhammad ibn Musa also proposed that there is a force of attraction between heavenly bodies (gravity).

In 964, Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi gave the first descriptions and pictures of "A Little Cloud" now known as the Andromeda Galaxy and he was the first to record mention of the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Abu-Mahmud al-Khujandi relatively accurately computed the axial tilt to be 23.53 degrees, a significant improvement over the Greek and Indian estimates of 23.86 and 24 degrees.

In 1006, Ali ibn Ridwan observed SN 1006, the brightest supernova in recorded history, and left a detailed written description of it.

In the early 11th century, Ibn al-Haytham in his Book of Optics (1021), was the first to discover that the celestial spheres do not consist of solid matter, and he also discovered that the heavens are less dense than the air. He also made the first attempt at observing and measuring the Milky Way's parallax, and he thus "determined that because the Milky Way had no parallax, it was very remote from the earth and did not belong to the atmosphere." Abu Rayhan al-Biruni discovered the Milky Way galaxy to be a collection of numerous nebulous stars.

Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya (1292-1350), in his Miftah Dar al-SaCadah, used empirical arguments in astronomy in order to refute the practice of astrology. He recognized that the stars are much larger than the planets. This gave scientific relevance for the seperation of astrology and astronomy.

Between 1025 and 1028, Ibn al-Haytham wrote Doubts on Ptolemy. He was the first to criticize Ptolemy's astronomical system, which he criticized on empirical, observational and experimental grounds, and for relating actual physical motions to imaginary mathematical points, lines and circles. He was also an influence on optics in later telescope designs.

By 1031, al-Biruni completed his extensive astronomical encyclopaedia in which he recorded his astronomical findings and formulated astronomical tables and was first to state that the motions of the solar apogee and the precession are not identical. Al-Biruni also discovered that the distance between the Earth and the Sun is larger than Ptolomy had calculated. The Islam view that the Earth rotated upon an axis was accepted at this time.

Between the 11th and 12th centuries, Islam astronomers had found so many faults in the Ptolomic model that this era is termed the Andalusian Revolt. Islamists were denying the existance of epicycles and replacing them with elliptical orbits.

In the following centuries, the works of Ibn al-Haytham and al-Biruni became well known in Europe.

Ibn al-Shatir (1304–1375) in A Final Inquiry Concerning the Rectification of Planetary Theory, came very close to discovering the true heliocentric model. His rectified model was later adapted into a heliocentric model by Copernicus which was achieved by reversing the direction of the last vector connecting the Earth to the Sun. In the published version of his masterwork, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), Copernicus cites the theories of al-Battani, Arzachel and Averroes as influences towards his heliocentric model.

[Some Dude]

There's a lot of contributions that islamic people made, just google it and you'll find a handful.