Hipparchus is often referred to as the "Father of Astronomy". He's been credited with discovering the Earth's precession and calculating the motions of the Sun and Moon. The earliest known attempt to map the night sky to date is thought to have taken place in the late 16th century.
For hundreds of years, scholars have been looking for that catalog. They have found what appears to be the first Greek remnants of Hipparchus' star catalog. A paper published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy states that it was hidden underneath Christian texts.
A multispectral image combines visible images in blue, green, and red with an X-ray image of an object This can show hidden drawings or writings beneath the paint or ink. Researchers have used the technique before to reveal hidden text on Dead Sea Scroll fragments. The French physicist Gabriel Lippmann, who pioneered color photography and won the 1908 Nobel Prize in physics, was the subject of a Swiss study. As a result of Lippmann's technique, the method was corrected.
The Codex Climaci Rescriptus was originated at Saint Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula. The manuscripts include the Old and New Testament and Greek text of the New Testament. The texts were written in the 6th, 7th, and 8th century. The codex was kept at a college in Cambridge until 2010 when it was purchased by the president of a business. The Green Collection is on display in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, but a few of the books are in other places.
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At the time, scrapers were used to clean old parchment and reuse it. The older writing was thought to be Christian. When Peter Williams, a biblical scholar at Cambridge University, asked his summer students to study the pages as a special project, one of them identified a Greek passage by the astronomer Eratosthenes.
Scientists at the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in California and the University of Rochester in New York were asked by Williams to investigate the pages in the codex. The Eratosthenes passage about star origin myths, as well as a famous poem about constellations, were revealed by the technique.
One day, while studying the images, Williams noticed what looked to be the coordinates of a constellation. He immediately contacted a science historian in Paris. The man told Nature that he was excited from the start. We had star coordinates.
The one-page passage was translated by the two men.
Corona Borealis, lying in the northern hemisphere, in length spans 9°¼ from the first degree of Scorpius to 10°¼ in the same zodiacal sign (i.e. in Scorpius). In breadth it spans 6°¾ from 49° from the North Pole to 55°¾.
Within it, the star (β CrB) to the West next to the bright one (α CrB) leads (i.e. is the first to rise), being at Scorpius 0.5°. The fourth star (ι CrB) to the East of the bright one (α CrB) is the last (i.e. to rise) [. . .]10 49° from the North Pole. Southernmost (δ CrB) is the third counting from the bright one (α CrB) towards the East, which is 55°¾ from the North Pole.
Could this be the work of Hipparchus? The authors cite a number of pieces of evidence that seem to link the text to the astronomer. The only other surviving work of Hipparchus was recorded in an unusual way. Hipparchus would have been working on his catalog when the observations were recorded in the text.
AdvertisementThe researchers think Hipparchus mapped the entire night sky, just like Ptolemy did in his later book. Hipparchus' catalog is believed to be one of the sources Ptolemy used when writing his book.
Hipparchus' calculations of coordinates were more correct than Ptolemy's. The telescope hadn't yet been invented, so this was a huge achievement. They think Hipparchus used a dioptra to make his calculations. They hope that more parts of the lost star catalog can be found in the monastery's library.
The journal deals with the history of astronomy. The About DOIs section of the website.
The museum of the bible has a listing image.
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