Re: VMs: Replies on the Pleiades Occultation Thread

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

despite Jan's kind comments, I would not claim
to be the most knowledgable astronomer on the list!

What we need is someone who has some experience in
historical astronomy, but from reading in
D'Imperio we can understand that this has been
attempted many decades ago, without any great 
success. Wouldn't it have been nice if we had
more details? We know that Panofsky has spent some
time with the MS, but what about his friend
Saxl, who has published at length about this
type of illustrations?

I think that the combined astro knowledge in this
group can at least confirm that there are no
obviously identifiable planets, stars or
constellations in the VMs, with the exception 
(beside the many Suns and Moons) being the very
illustration we're talking about.

For me, the astronomical illustrations fall in the
same category as the herbal ones: quite close
in general layout to existing MS's, but still
different in all details, thereby not allowing
positive identification, or even hard proof that
any particular existing plant (or view of the
sky) is intended by the author.

Of course, this conversation would be quite
different if we could read the text. It is still
useful to have it, in the absence of such good
hard information, since there is the hope of
finding additional cribs.

Getting back to the illustration of interest,
as I wrote before, the Pleiades are almost a 
certain guess, but does it show that the author
was a great observer?
This is not at all clear. The group is known as
the group of seven stars in many different cultures,
and there are seven stars drawn, but the naked eye
will invariably see 6 or 8 stars or more. Never
seven. This is not just my point of view, this is
a known feature since documented history.
The group of stars in the VMs doesn't particularly
look like the Pleiades, but this is perhaps not
relevant. I am not aware of any ME illustrations
where they have been drawn somewhat accurately.

(I'm rather sure that someone must have written
a learned piece about this some time).

I also support the idea of the Moon occulting
the Pleiades, with or without yesterday's
ominous event cited by Robert :-)

Even Aldebaran is quite a credible guess, but
for me (IMHO) we're getting into the 50/50
realm here.

I would greatly welcome a more detailed analysis
of which other stars and/or planets could be 
identified, and I look forward to Robert's 
results. Of course I am aware of most part of
his hypotheses, but a more complete layout of it
would be most welcome.
While I have already expressed my skepticism 
about some aspects of it, I would like to stress
that this is all quite interesting, and cannot
be discarded as easily as any of the 'solutions'
that have been presented over the years, where
the probability of correctness is vanishingly
small.
Well, perhaps apart from the identification of 
Tycho's face in one of the drawings :-/

Cheers, Rene
  


		
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