Towards the end Newton, having claimed to prove every observation claimed by Ptolemy in the Almagest was fabricated, writes :-
[Ptolemy] developed certain astronomical theories and discovered that they were not consistent with observation. Instead of abandoning the theories, he deliberately fabricated observations from the theories so that he could claim that the observations prove the validity of his theories. In every scientific or scholarly setting known, this practice is called fraud, and it is a crime against science and scholarship.
Although the evidence produced by Brahe, Delambre, Newton and others certainly do show that Ptolemy's errors are not random, this last quote from is, I [EFR] believe, a crime against Ptolemy (to use Newton's own words). The book [8] is written to study validity of these accusations and it is a work which I strongly believe gives the correct interpretation. Grasshoff writes:-
... one has to assume that a substantial proportion of the Ptolemaic star catalogue is grounded on those Hipparchan observations which Hipparchus already used for the compilation of the second part of his "Commentary on Aratus". Although it cannot be ruled out that coordinates resulting from genuine Ptolemaic observations are included in the catalogue, they could not amount to more than half the catalogue.
... the assimilation of Hipparchan observations can no longer be discussed under the aspect of plagiarism. Ptolemy, whose intention was to develop a comprehensive theory of celestial phenomena, had no access to the methods of data evaluation using arithmetical means with which modern astronomers can derive from a set of varying measurement results, the one representative value needed to test a hypothesis. For methodological reason, then, Ptolemy was forced to choose from a set of measurements the one value corresponding best to what he had to consider as the most reliable data. When an intuitive selection among the data was no longer possible ... Ptolemy had to consider those values as 'observed' which could be confirmed by theoretical predictions.
As a final comment we quote the epigram which is accepted by many scholars to have been written by Ptolemy himself, and it appears in Book 1 of the Almagest, following the list of contents (see for example [11]):-
Well do I know that I am mortal, a creature of one day.
But if my mind follows the winding paths of the stars
Then my feet no longer rest on earth, but standing by
Zeus himself I take my fill of ambrosia, the divine dish.
J J O'Connor and E F Robertson