Early astronomers were the ones that were interested the most in Verisimilitude. Ordinary people might have looked up at the sky in wonder, but it was the scientists who dedicated themselves to study and understand it, along with creating instruments to qualify and quantify its content. For philosophers the night represents the moment in which humans are faced with the infinite and existential questions. Writers and poets, composers or musicians have of course also confronted the night sky and its meaning. But I won’t consider the written word nor notes and compositions. I have decided to display and work with some representations before Christ and some others from the 1800s, as it is when artificial light was introduced and light pollution started.
Already in antiquity religious leaders or astronomers created asterisms and a cartography from sky observations done by the human eye without any mediation expect the one of written notes and later on lenses.
Hipparchus from Nicaea, who lived from 190 to 120 BC, is considered the father of astronomy, founder of trigonometry, and is said to have classified the equinoxes. He could by then make quantitative and accurate models for the motion of the sun and the moon. He compiled the first known comprehensive star catalogue, his own charts of the sky, and he probably invented the astrolabe. He could absolve partially to his discoveries by using Babylonian sources and possibly 4.000 years of knowledge that was stored in the library of Alexandria.
Recently two students have used AI tools to rebuild a destroyed papyrus. My first thought was: what if we could reconstruct the library of Alexandria from dust and particles of ashes?
Fragments of Hipparchus’s catalogue have recently turned up in a manuscript that had been erased and written over. Victor Gysembergh, a historian of ancient science at CNRS in Paris, analysed the hidden text. He and his colleagues reported the discovery in the November 2022 Journal for the History of Astronomy (a link to the whole article can be found in the bibliography).
The manuscript that concealed the fragments was an erased and reused palimpsest, called the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, probably coming from the monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai in Egypt, and currently housed at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. The visible writing is a Christian text, but shadows of earlier symbols are visible behind it. In 2017, researchers with the Early Manuscripts Electronics Library in Rolling Hills Estates, California, and the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York took digital pictures of the codex in many wavelengths of light, from many different angles. This technique is called multispectral imaging and is used to analyse palimpsests and other damaged books.
Light that reflected off the ancient ink, or that made the ink fluoresce, highlighted the hidden text. Biblical scholar Peter Williams of the University of Cambridge and his team had previously found ancient poetry about astronomy beneath the main text. This time, he also found something that looked like astronomical measurements. Williams reached out to Gysembergh and historian Emanuel Zingg of Sorbonne University in Paris for help. Gysembergh immediately thought of Hipparchus. The passage turned out to be a description of the constellation Corona Borealis, the northern crown, giving numerical coordinates for several of its stars. The coordinates were written in an unusual notation that was thought to have been used only by Hipparchus. Next, the researchers used planetarium software to calculate the position of the stars in the sky in 129 B.C., when Hipparchus was alive and working. Those calculations matched the ancient manuscript’s notations to within one degree. Astronomers in ancient Babylonia may have had their own star catalogue that was written even earlier.
In the first picture one can see the detail of the codex, that shows the original writing in ordinary light, with some shadows of the hidden undertext visible behind it. In the last picture, the Greek text that was revealed by multispectral analysis is highlighted in yellow.
This work has fascinated me not only because it showed efforts to look for findings to understand the night sky, but also for its transdisciplinary approach.
Here you can see how the possibilities have been developing to represent, in this case, Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, described by Hipparchus over an arc of more than 2000 years.
You'll encounter more in room 7, dedicated to GLASS PLATES and the Harvard DASCH project.
Corona Borealis galaxy cluster (Abell 2065), image taken by Adam Block from a Schulman 32-inch RCOS Telescope with a SBIG STX16803 camera at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter / University of Arizona, USA on April 1st, 2012 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Positive of a glas plate taken from an 8-inch Draper Doublet telescope in Cambridge, USA, on May 12th, 1937 at 05:09 am (original GLASPLATE i55323)
