These essays give the visitor some helpful background, to help in navigating the other halls and exhibits of our little museum.
In which we invite the reader to view the sky through ancient eyes, to better understand astronomy in a time before lenses. The stars provided a clock for the nighttime hours, and a navigator’s aid. The heliacal rising and setting of bright sentinel stars marked a calendar of the year. In recent centuries that most people have lost connection with this traditional wisdom; to understand the history of the constellations, we have to understand how people of the Bronze Age viewed and used the stars.
A New History of the Greek Constellations
Here we argue that a collection of Greek constellations – Orion, Perseus, Auriga and more – can be dated to 1400 BCE, give or take a half-century. We further suggest that these Greeks of the Mycenaean era adopted the Mesopotamian practice of astrology, along with the constellations of the Zodiac.
Book VII, chapter i of Ptolemy’s Almagest is famous for its accounting and confirmation of Hipparchus’ observation of the precession of the celestial sphere (a motion we ascribe today to the precession of the earth’s axis of rotation). Less famously, Hipparchus proposed an alternative explanation for his own observations, and set forth an experiment to test it — an experiment crafted to span a century or more. Here, we present an introduction to this experiment: the starlines of Almagest.
It’s easy for a modern reader to dismiss the methods of Ptolemy, or the stories of Greek mythology. In these halls, we aim to understand this history not in a modern light, but in the context of the past. We try our best to look at the skies through ancient eyes.
PDF Flipbooks
In the Stellarion, we use pdf flipbooks to illustrate the sky.
Here is an example. We invite you to take a look.
For a fullscreen view, press the four-arrowed icon in the upper right corner
use the spacebar or arrow keys to move from slide to slide
and press ESC to exit fullscreen
(We hope to find funding to animate and narrate these presentations.
You can help by clicking on one of the PayPal buttons scattered about.)
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