stars hidden in plain sight
Who says that beauty can’t be truth, that art can’t be science? It seems that a scientist at LSU has “found the long-lost sky catalog of Hipparchus”:http://www.astronomy.com/default.aspx?c=a&id=2773 in plain sight. Specifically, it’s on a statue called the “Famese Atlas”:http://sights.seindal.dk/img/orig/9456.jpg, a depiction of Atlas holding up the sky. Apparently the sculptor used one of Hipparchus’ catalogs to lay out the constellations on the 7-foot statue’s globe, with enough accuracy that the sky depicted can be dated to within 50 years.
Posted by Chris in Science on January 18th, 2005 Edit this page's grammar and spelling with Emend.
