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Visions of Ancient Night Sky Were Hiding in Plain Sight for Centuries
By KENNETH CHANG

Published: January 18, 2005

SAN DIEGO, Jan. 12 - Two thousand years later, astronomers still talk 
about Hipparchus' star catalog, the earliest known compendium of the 
night sky.

Hipparchus, who lived in Greece during the second century B.C., was 
perhaps the world's first great astronomer. He calculated, within six 
and a half minutes, the length of a year. He figured out that Earth's 
axis wobbles as it spins. For his star catalog, completed in 129 B.C., 
he devised a coordinate system to plot each star's location and a scale 
to rank the brightness. Astronomers still use this magnitude scale 
today.

Most of Hipparchus' work, however, is known only secondhand. No one has 
seen the catalog for centuries, a fabled ancient text apparently lost 
forever.

No one until Dr. Bradley E. Schaefer thought of looking for it on a 
statue.

At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society here, Dr. Schaefer, a 
professor of physics at Louisiana State University, reported that the 
text of Hipparchus' catalog was still lost, but that he had found 
possibly the next best thing, a pictorial representation of the 
catalog's contents.

"Here we have a real example of lost ancient knowledge being 
discovered," Dr. Schaefer said. Perhaps not quite the da Vinci code, 
but, as he described it, "some of the most influential lost ancient 
lore."

Dr. Owen Gingerich, an expert on the history of astronomy at Harvard, 
described Dr. Schaefer's research as "quite astonishing."

Remarkably, the new discovery has been in plain view for centuries.

A seven-foot-tall statue at the National Archaeological Museum in 
Naples, Italy, shows the god Atlas kneeling with a globe weighing on his 
shoulders. Atlas was sentenced by Zeus to hold up the sky, and the globe 
is a depiction of the night sky as seen from Earth, with pictures of 
Aries the ram, Cygnus the swan, Hercules the hero and other animals and 
people representing 41 constellations. The statue, known as the Farnese 
Atlas, is the oldest surviving pictorial record of Western 
constellations. It dates to Roman times, around A.D. 150, and is known 
to be a copy of an earlier Greek work.

"It was just sitting there, waiting," Dr. Schaefer said.

Dr. Edwin C. Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, 
said modern notions tended to discount Greek myths as more astrology 
than astronomy. "We tend to think they were silly stories that the 
ancients told," he said. "I don't think anyone thought to take the 
Farnese Atlas seriously as a source of ancient data."

The sculpture offers hints that it may have serious scientific 
underpinnings. The globe has horizontal lines for the Equator, the 
Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. 
An angled circle marks the ecliptic, the plane defined by the orbits of 
the planets, and vertical lines mark colures, the equivalent of lines of 
longitude on a map of the Earth.

Some historians had speculated that the sculptor might have consulted 
the work of Ptolemy, who lived about 250 years after Hipparchus, or 
Aratus, who described the constellations in a poem about a century 
before Hipparchus. Curiously, no one appears to have suggested 
Hipparchus' catalog as the reference source.

Dr. Schaefer asked a simple question: in what year were the 
constellations in the positions depicted on the Farnese Atlas? Because 
of the wobble in the Earth's axis, the constellations slide around the 
sky on a 26,000-year cycle.

He noted where parts of constellations that correspond to specific stars 
intersected with the lines on the globe. For example, the westernmost 
part of Aries' horn, which corresponds to the star Gamma Ari, touches 
one of the colures, and the chest of Leo, location of the star Regulus, 
lies on the Tropic of Cancer line. From photographs he took of the 
statue during a vacation stop in Naples last year, he calculated the 
positions of other constellation stars.

"They tell you the time," Dr. Schaefer said. "It's like the big hand 
moving through the sky."

Using 70 stars, Dr. Schaefer determined that the Farnese Atlas best 
matches the sky of 125 B.C. give or take 55 years - too early for 
Ptolemy, too late for Aratus, but almost a perfect match for Hipparchus. 
In addition, the constellations were placed more accurately than could 
be deduced from verbal descriptions, Dr. Schaefer said, another argument 
against Aratus' poem.

He also found that the Farnese Atlas globe agreed in detail with the 
only surviving work of Hipparchus, a commentary on Aratus and Eudoxes, 
an earlier astronomer who provided the basis for Aratus' poem. On the 
other hand, Dr. Schaefer found contradictions between the globe and the 
writings of Aratus, Eudoxes and Ptolemy.

Dr. Schaefer said Hipparchus made small celestial globes showing the 
positions of stars in his catalog, and the original Greek sculptor 
probably consulted one of these globes in chiseling the Farnese Atlas.

"This is a credible demonstration," Dr. Krupp said. "I think this is the 
first time that a very detailed systematic and careful analysis of this 
has been performed."

Now that astronomers and science historians seem to have a direct 
representation of Hipparchus' catalog, they can try to figure out 
questions like which coordinate system he used. It will also be fodder 
for a debate as to who was the greater astronomer of antiquity, 
Hipparchus or Ptolemy?

Dr. Gingerich, who has considered himself in Ptolemy's camp, said, "Now 
I may have to do some rethinking."

Some Hipparchus supporters even contend that Ptolemy created his star 
catalog largely by plagiarizing Hipparchus.

Dr. Schaefer diplomatically said that they were both the greatest.

-- 
Kees Cook                                             at outflux.net