Long Lost Star Catalog Found in Plain Sight

[Ivan Seeking]

The long lost star catalog of Hipparchus has been under our noses – or, more accurately, slightly above them – for more than 1,800 years.

Sitting atop the broad shoulders of a seven-foot statue known as the Farnese Atlas is a sky globe depicting the nighttime sky. Scientists have been able to match the constellations shown on the globe with descriptions from Hipparchus’s only surviving work, Commentaries, and have concluded that this is a marble copy of his star catalog. [continued]

http://space.com/scienceastronomy/hipparchus_catalogue_050124.html

 

[marcus]

http://space.com/scienceastronomy/hipparchus_catalogue_050124.html

nice article, thanks

Hipparchus is a hero of mine-----they mention a bunch of reasons he deserves respect and admiration in the article

two other achievements, he invented trigonometry and made tables of something like sine and cosine, very handy for astronomy

and he measured the distance to the moon rather accurately

he found that it was 30 times the Earth's diameter, which I guess is right to the indicated (twodigit) accuracy, so that was a good measurement for that time (without sophisticated instruments)

might be interesting for anybody who wants to speculate about how they would measure the distance to the moon, see if they come up with the same method Hipparchus used

 

[JesseM]

Here's an interesting article explaining the theory that Hipparchus' discovery of precession was the basis for the Mithraic mystery religion--it actually mentions this very same statue in the course of explaining the Roman view of the cosmos:

http://www.well.com/user/davidu/mithras.html