Re: VMs: Replies on the Pleiades Occultation Thread

[KenW <ken@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rene Zandbergen wrote:

> 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. 
Until quite recently, attempting to trudge through potential 
astronomical events from centuries ago was very, very difficult unless 
you had the time and access to big computers.  Now this power is in the 
hands of anyone with any fairly decent sky program.  So, has anyone but 
R. Teague bothered to try this recently?

> 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.
>  
Unfortunately, I probably agree with you here, but I still think it's 
worth a look, just in case.

> 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.
>  
True, the Pleiades are almost always depicted or described as containing 
6 stars.  The "7 stars" are simply based on applying the Greek tale of 
the Seven Sisters to this asterism.  I would bet that if the Greeks had 
a Five Sisters reference in their culture we'd be wondering why the 6th 
star was there.

Ken W

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