mysteries of egyptian zodiacs - HiddenMysteries Information Central

However, all these pecularities disappear when we renounce
the hypothesis claiming that the Almagest was compiled
in the beginning of the Christian era. Let us find out
what would be the best epoch in which Northen Star would be
the most natural choice for the first star in the catalogue. On
Figure 1.16 we show the trajectory of the north pole around
the ecliptic pole P , and the locations of the stars Alpha and
Beta. It is clear that with the time the astronomical situation
was changing: Beta was gradually moving away from the
north pole, while Alpha was directly approaching the north
pole. We have indicated on Figure 1.16 the initial position N
of the north pole in the 2nd century A.D. The angular velocity
of the north pole moving around the ecliptic is about
1 o per 100 years. Now we are in the position to find out the
epoch when North Star became closer to the northy pole than
the star Beta. Since an argument of this type can hardly be
considered as reliable for the dating purposes, we are satified
with a rough estimate indicating the period from the 9th
to 11th century A.D. At that time Alpha was closer to the
north pole than Beta and Alpha was also the brightest star
of Ursa Minor (M = +2.1 for Alpha, while for Beta it was
M = +2.2). It is also obvious that at that time an observer
compiling a star catalogue, would choose the star Alpha as
the first star in the Northen Hemisphere. Notice that it is
exactly, how the creator of the Almagest listed the stars. In
addition, during the 15th and 16th centuries, when the publications
of the Almagest took place, North Star was the closest
star to the north pole — its distance was only 4 o from the
north pole. Consequently, by chosing North Star as the first
star in the catalogue, the creator of the Almagest revealed the
real time of its observations — the epoch that was not earlier
than the 9th or 10th century.
1.7.3 Statistical Analysis of the Star Catalogue
Almagest
Let us return to the investigation of the Almagest conducted
by astronomer R. Newton’s. It is important to emphesize that
Newton never, at any moment, doubted the correctness of
Scaliger’s chronology. His conclusions can be summarized as
follows:
1. The astronomical stitation on the real sky in the beginning
of the Christian era does not match the astronomical
data contained in the Almagest;
2. The presently availabe version of the star catalogue Almagest
does not contain descriptions of direct astronomical
observations, but the results of computations, based
on the theoretical models. These theoretical computations
were later inserted into the Almagest seemingly to falsely
assume the real astronomical observations, i.e. they were
(according to Newton) fabricated;
3. The Almagest couldn’t be compiled around the year 150
A.D., as it is claimed by Scaliger’s chronology;
4. Consequently, the Almagest was created during another
epoch and its dating should be revised accordingly.
R. Newton points out the passages in the Almagest indicating
that the astronomical observations were conducted during the
1.7 Controversy over the Ptolemy’s Almagest 15
reign of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius, who according
to Scaliger’s chronology ruled from 138 to 161 AD. Therefore,
R. Newton concludes, that whoever was the author of
the Almagest, he was a liar. There is no way his “personnally
made observations” could ever represent a real astronomical
situation from the 2nd century. In the introduction to
his book, Robert Newton stated that it was a story about a
crime comitted by a scientist against the ethics in his profession.
He claimed that Ptolemy’s star catalogue was “corrected”
according to the precession used by Hipparchus. For
example, he shows that the equinoxes and other observations
allegedly made by Ptolemy to determine the ecliptic’s slop
and Alexandria’s latitude, were fabricated. There were also
four fabricated lunar eclipse “triads,” falsifications of calculations
and falsification of data (for example related to Venus
and the exterior planet data). Newton completes his thought
with a statement that Ptolemy was not an outstanding astronomer
of antiquity but rather a most successful swindler
in the history of science 58 .
However, a perception of the Ptolemy’s work may become
quite different if it turns out that it was a text written in the
10-16th century. In the book [106], the authors, V.V. Kalashnikov,
G.B. Nosovsky and A.T. Fomenko, verified the correctness
of R. Newton’s calculations and confirmed his findings. In
contrast to R. Newton, their goal was to achieve an independent
dating of the Almagest based on the mathematical and
statistical analysis of the individual stars’ proper motion. This
is not an easy problem, which required a careful analysis of
the accuracy of the Almagest’s star coordinates. Let us recall
that every star in the catalogue was identified by two ecliptic
coordinates: longitude and latitude. It was discovered that
the accuracy of the longitudes was much worse than that of
the latitudes, leading to a suspission that they were obtained
by a method quite usual in the Middle Ages: by measuring
equatorial coordinates and subsequently recarculating them
into ecliptical ones. Since the calculations of the ecliptic longitudes
were much more complicated, larger errors arose and
the accuracy failed, making them useless for the purpose of
dating the Almagest. In addition, the longitudal precessions
were already well known in the Middle Ages, what could have
been tempting to manipulate this data. The method used in
[106] was applied to latitudes only. Its effectivness was tested
on the several star cataloges whose dates are well known (for
example the star cataloge of Tycho Brahe, Bonner Durchmusterung,
etc.). It involved extensive computations which
were done using specially writen for this purpose computer
programs.
For the purpose of computations, a list of 80 relatively
fast moving stars was compiled, based on the modern star
catalogue by D. Hofflit (The Bright Star Catalogue). Based
on this list about 35 stars were identified in the Almagest,
from which three had to be rejected because their identity
couldn’t be indisputably established. Let us point out that it
was not a trivial question to identify some of the stars in the
Almagest. Basically, the star identifications in [106] confirm
58 See [178].