Part of Lost Star Catalog of Hipparchus Found Lurking Under Medieval Codex
upstart writes:
Part of lost star catalog of Hipparchus found lurking under medieval codex:
The Greek astronomer Hipparchus is often called the "father of astronomy." He's credited with discovering the Earth's precession (how it wobbles on its axis), and calculating the motions of the Sun and Moon, among other achievements. Hipparchus was also believed to be compiling a star catalog-perhaps the earliest known attempt to map the night sky to date-sometime between 162 and 127 BCE, based on references in historical texts.
Scholars have been searching for that catalog for centuries. Now, thanks to a technique called multispectral imaging, they have found what seems to be the first known Greek remnants of Hipparchus' star catalog. It was hidden beneath Christian texts on medieval parchment, according to a new paper published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy.
Multispectral imaging is a method that takes visible images in blue, green, and red and combines them with an infrared image and an X-ray image of an object. This can reveal minute hints of pigment, as well as hidden drawings or writings underneath various layers of paint or ink. For instance, researchers have previously used the technique to reveal hidden text on four Dead Sea Scroll fragments previously believed to be blank. And last year, Swiss scientists used multispectral imaging to reconstruct photographic plates created by French physicist Gabriel Lippmann, who pioneered color photography and snagged the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics for his efforts. The method corrected for distortions of color that occurred as a result of Lippmann's technique.
The current paper arose from research into the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a palimpsest that originated at Saint Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. It consists of 11 individual manuscripts, with Aramaic texts of the Old and New Testament and Greek text of the New Testament, among other content. Those texts have been dated to the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries, respectively. The codex was kept at Westminster College in Cambridge until 2010, when Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, purchased it from Sotheby's. It's now part of the Green Collection on display in the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, although a few folios are stored elsewhere.
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