Been following this since i knew about it a few years back, it's so interesting in what it reveals we do not know about history, we hardly know what the Greeks knew in respect to astronomy or mathematics as this predates algorithmic trigonometry, and appears to be using Babylonian techniques to predict ellipses in orbits etc.
It is something they found in a shipwreck back in 1901, basically a metal computer of gears and mechanisms to predict the motion of the planets precisely and accurately. Made in the 3rd century BC. Remarkable.
An ancient Greek astronomical puzzle now has another piece in place.
The New York Times reported the new evidence today in a story about research by James Evans, professor of physics at University of Puget Sound, and Christián Carman, history of science professor at University of Quilmes, Argentina.
The two researchers published a paper advancing our understanding of the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek mechanism that modeled the known universe of 2,000 years ago. The heavily encrusted, clocklike mechanism—dubbed the "world's first computer"—was retrieved from an ancient shipwreck on the bottom of the sea off Greece in 1901. The new work is published in the Archive for History of Exact Science.
http://phys.org/news/2014-11-antikythera-mechanism-clues-ancient-greek.html