astronomy

5,500-Year-Old Sumerian Star Map Of Ancient Nineveh and the Observation Of Köfels’ Impact Event

Image | | Paul Greer

 

“For over 150 years scientists have tried to solve the mystery of a controversial cuneiform clay tablet that indicates the so-called Köfel’s impact event was observed in ancient times. The circular stone-cast tablet was recovered from the 650 BC underground library of King Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, Iraq in the late 19th century. Long thought to be an Assyrian tablet, computer analysis has matched it with the sky above Mesopotamia in 3300 BC and proves it to be of much more ancient Sumerian origin. The tablet is an “Astrolabe,” the earliest known astronomical instrument. It consists of a segmented, disk-shaped star chart with marked units of angle measure inscribed upon the rim.”

UPDATE:

Upon posting this item I got some feedback from internet friend and self-proclaimed Noticer Of Things, Chris Harris. Please find his updates below:

 

Venus, The Rose and the Heart

Image | | Paul Greer


This is the ‘dance’ of Venus, as viewed from earth.

“Venus has an eight-year rhythm, which formed the subject of the world’s oldest astrological text, a Venus-tablet from Nineveh. It was part of a series called Enuma Anu Enlil, the ‘Book of the Gods of Heaven and Earth’, and was dated to the 17th century BC. It effectively recorded the five synodic periods of Venus, giving a series of ten omens over the eight-year cycle through the pattern of Venus’s appearance and disappearance from view.

“To the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the musical interval generated by Venus and Earth was a ‘sixth’, given by dividing a string in the fraction 5/8.  He said the relation was a ‘marital’ one and varied between the ‘masculine sixth’ G# – E and the ‘feminine’ one of Gb – E. This ratio of 5 to 8 is the key to the pattern traced by Venus against the stars.

“Venus traces a pentagon shape in the sky over ten meetings with the Sun; it does this by moving, between each ‘inferior’ conjunction, exactly 1.6 times around the zodiac, and the time it takes to do this, 584 days, is its synodic period. The pentagon shape is traced around the zodiac in five such synodic periods, which is 7.993 years or 8 years to a fraction of a day. Venus returns to the same portion of the zodiac after ten solar conjunctions, over a period of exactly 8 years.

“The rotation rate of Venus on its own axis was not discovered until 1967 by means of radar. This was able to peer through the dense mists surrounding the planet, and find a rotation period of precisely two-thirds of an Earth-year, or 243 days. Strangely enough, it was in the opposite direction to its rotation around the Sun. This meant that, in an eight-year period, Venus revolves exactly twelve times on its own axis. The numbers 5, 8 and 12 are here interacting. “

— Nick Kollerstrom

Galilei Galileo (1564-1642) The Pleiades – Sidereus Nuncius

Image | | Paul Greer


Galilei Galileo (1564-1642) The Pleiades - Sidereus Nuncius

 

“Sidereus Nuncius (usually Sidereal Messenger, also Starry Messenger or Sidereal Message) is a short astronomical treatise (or pamphlet) published in New Latin by Galileo Galilei on March 13, 1610.[1] It was the first published scientific work based on observations made through a telescope, and it contains the results of Galileo’s early observations of the imperfect and mountainous Moon, the hundreds of stars that were unable to be seen in either the Milky Way or certain constellations with the naked eye, and the Medicean Stars that appeared to be circling Jupiter.”

Voyager Captures Sounds of Interstellar Space

Video | | Paul Greer

 

“NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft captured these sounds of interstellar space. Voyager 1’s plasma wave instrument detected the vibrations of dense interstellar plasma, or ionized gas, from October to November 2012 and April to May 2013. The graphic shows the frequency of the waves, which indicate the density of the plasma. Colors indicate the intensity of the waves, or how “loud” they are. Red indicates the loudest waves and blue indicates the weakest. The soundtrack reproduces the amplitude and frequency of the plasma waves as “heard” by Voyager 1. The waves detected by the instrument antennas can be simply amplified and played through a speaker. These frequencies are within the range heard by human ears. Scientists noticed that each occurrence involved a rising tone. The dashed line indicates that the rising tones follow the same slope. This means a continuously increasing density. When scientists extrapolated this line even further back in time (not shown), they deduced that Voyager 1 first encountered interstellar plasma in August 2012. The Voyager spacecraft were built and continue to be operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The Voyager missions are a part of NASA’s Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. For more information about Voyager, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov .”

This is a Volvelle a Medieval Computer…

Image | | Paul Greer


Volvelle

“This is a volvelle, a medieval device that allowed you to calculate the phases of the moon and the latter’s position in relation to the sun. The dials, with their charming depictions of moon and sun, tell you what you need to know. What’s most remarkable about the device is not so much its crafty nature – it consists of complex layers of rotating disks – but that it is usually fitted inside a medieval book. Some are so bulky that they pierce the adjacent pages. What a surprise it must have been for the medieval reader who thumbed through such a book for the first time. Turning a page, he or she was confronted with an ingenious piece of machinery. A medieval computer.”

— Erik Kwakkel