Slashdot Mirror
Is Atlas Holding Hipparchus' Lost Star Map?
cr0kin0le writes "The Farnese Atlas at the Naples National Archaeological Museum may be holding a celestial globe which accurately depicts the long-lost star catalog of Hipparchus, according to a physics professor at Louisiana State University."
The leaf seems to be real. It's probably the doing of the (very European) Pope Pius the IX in 1857, who thought that naked statues should be covered up. In recent years they have been restored, and the NY Times probably used an old picture - whether or not that was on purpose we don't know.
From the FA: picture without leaf
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
That's because most people now have better things to do than look up in the sky at night. Those people of the past didn't really have much else to entertain themselves with.
Uh, i just did a quick google for "Farnese Atlas statue" (as noted under the picture), and the results were without the leaf !! :)
see here: picture (but beware, it contains nudity, oh the horror !)
A sculpture probably isn't going to show enough detail, but old charts are interesting as they can show stars as being brighter or dimmer than they are today. For example, in the mid 19th century Eta Carinae was the second brightest star in the sky (after Sirius), now it's almost invisible to the naked eye (around 5th magnitude IIRC). The bright stars Castor and Pollux in Gemini were around the same magnitude, now Castor is dimmer (the brighter Pollux is still 'beta Geminorum'). I wonder what Hipparchos might have seen that we dont see now?
David, for example, suffered this fate.
It is, in fact, a European thing. The leaf is a real covering, as ordered by a Medieval Pope...
For those of you who don't catch the reference, this is the story: (or, rather, the debunking of the story)
"The Breast was pretty quiet during the eight years of Janet Reno. As one peeved administration official puts it, "No cameraman was ever at Reno's feet, trying to get a shot of her with that thing." But Minnie Lou's outstanding feature stormed back with Ashcroft. When President Bush visited the Justice Department to rededicate the building to Robert Kennedy, his advance men insisted on a nice blue backdrop: "TV blue," infinitely preferable to the usual dingy background of the Great Hall. Everyone thought the backdrop worked nicely -- made for "good visuals," as they say. This was Deaverism, pure and simple. Ashcroft's people intended to keep using it.
An advance woman on his team had the bright idea of buying the backdrop: It would be cheaper than renting it repeatedly. So she did -- without Ashcroft's knowledge, without his permission, without his caring, everyone in the department insists.
But ABC put out the story that Ashcroft, the old prude, had wanted the Breast covered up, so much did it offend his churchly sensibilities. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, ever clever, wrote that Ashcroft had forced a "blue burka" on Minnie Lou. Comedians had a field day (and are still having it). The Washington Post has devoted great space to the story, letting Cher, for example, tee off on it -- as she went on to do on David Letterman's show.
And yet the story is complete and total bunk. First, Ashcroft had nothing to do with the purchase of the backdrop. Second, the backdrop had nothing to do with Breast aversion. But the story was just "too good to check," as we say, and it will probably live forever. Generations from now, if we're reading about John Ashcroft, we will read that he was the boob who draped the Boob. The story is ineffaceable."
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Actually, this is a European thing. Many old sculptures and statues were modified by the catholic church during past centuries in the name of 'decency'. Fig leaves were typically added, made of alabaster or a similar stone to the original statue, and affixed using concrete. This is also why many statues you will now see in this part of the world lack genitalia, as when the leaves were removed by a more enlightened age of society, the genitals fairly often came with.
The NYTimes photo is most likely an accurate picture, however is probably a lot older than the picture on the other site, and the fig leaf was removed sometime after the photo was taken.
It's a real leaf, that was placed on it in the Victorian era by Papal decree, and was recently removed as part of a restoration project, but most news outlets frankly don't want to spend $20 for an updated photo when their old stock still works.
Copies, eh?
If you check the caption on the NYT photo, it's credited to Reuters/Griffith Observatory (the latter is also the source of one of the "uninvolved experts" quoted in the text).
Now, the griffith observatory is currently closed to the public, but if you check their renovation news, you'll see that they're adding in a shiny new replica of the Farnese Atlas. Since they provided the photo, could they have just done a nice studio shot, or maybe one from the replicomat's catalog? After all, the lighting in the danish photo is pretty poor.
Now a real story would be if these were claimed to be from the s photos that the astronomer claimed to use for determining the age of the stars.
"Decidedly Nineteenth Century CE, or possibly 21st Century United States"
I hope you married a surgeon.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Astronomy is not the Flinstones version of TV, it was developed by many cultures as a way to measure time. The invention of Agriculture depended on ancient astronomy and before that hunter-gathers used it to find seasonal fruits and game. Astronomy's importance to the ancients is built into thier monuments, art, religion and buildings. This has now grown into modern science that gives many people today the technology to be ignorant about thier surroundings and still survive.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Are you kidding? They're probably over at the local nudie bar hiding from their wives. Some parts of the bible belt have more interesting strip clubs than Vegas.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Ancient beliefs combined stars, religion, navigation and folk heroes into a single "art" of "myth". One fascinating, though really long, essay regarding their involution, is called Hamlet's Mill. I wonder how this map could be decoded to learn more about who the Neapolitans, and their cartographic predecessor, Hipparchus, had "commerce" with.
--
make install -not war
The linked photo is from the Naples Archeological Museum (Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli). The NYTimes photo is from the Griffith Observatory in LA. Hence they're not necessarily the same piece of stone, and the latter may be a copy of the original in Naples. On another porn-related note, the Naples Museum is well known across the world for its beloved "Secret Room," full of sexually explicit artifacts dug up from Pompeii and other Roman sites. That, along with the awesome mosaics, are well worth the trip to Naples. Naples has a bad rap for a being unsafe (and parts of it are) but anyone going to Italy should surely go.
Anyone going out to sea will quickly discover the earth is round since tall buildings will be the last things to sink under the horizon. The ancient Greeks went beyond that and calculated the earth's approximate size based on the angle of sunlight in two different wells a known distance apart (with the help of some basic geometry).
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Low pressure sodium, not helium (well, some people might have suggested helium, but this is the first I've heard of it). Y'know, those nasty orange lights. Incredibly efficient, too.
http://www.darksky.org/