VMs: Re: The Star Chart on f68r3

["Petr Kazil" <kazil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> The Pleiades are carefully drawn, and using their orientation,
> found matches for all the stars shown. The diagram shows
> an area about 15° in diameter.

I think that taking the Pleiades as an "anchor" is a very good starting
point. However it is also possible that the author did not draw this tiny
star-cluster to scale.

> The star with the Pleiades in the northwest segment is not
> Aldebaran, as has been guessed, but a 5th magnitude star
> identified as HIP 17954 (...)

The stars that you identified - are they the brightest and best known ones
in that segment? Are there any brighter stars that are *in* your sky
segment, but *not on* the VMS star diagram? Are there many 4th, 3d etc
magnitudes that the VMS-author left out? (Magnitude decreases (linearly) as
brightness increases (exponentially) - am I right?)

And if you enlarge the segment to 30, 40, 50 degrees, would you get a better
match with some other, brighter stars?

I would be interested in a .jpg and could post it if you don't have webspace
of your own (and so could many others on the list). Could you also add an
enlarged segment of the Pleiades, to see if the VMS-author has drawn the
relative positions of the 7 stars correctly?

Thanks for the exciting hypothesis!

Just to raise a small counter-argument - it is strange that there is a
simple sequence of stars (1, 2, 3, 4) if you go clockwise through the
segments.

Also notice that they are all 7-pointed stars. If you look at the SE segment
it looks like the author first made a 6-pointed star and then added the 7th
point afterwards.

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