A fascinating book about the Sidereal zodiac...

[Guest guest]

At 03:54 AM 11/8/08 -0000, Julia Cybele wrote:

>

>Oh yes, I do still follow the posts here and have often

>wondered about the possibility of a binary companion for our

>Sun. Arcturus is nearly 37 light-years from us, and my

>impression is that this distance would be huge for a genuine

>orbital system, meaning several orders of magnitude. The

>force of attraction between two orbiting bodies diminishes

>with the square of the distance.

>(...)

>I've been interested in

>identifying low proper motion stars nearly on the ecliptic,

>which could serve as reasonably good measuring points over

>long spans of time. There are a few, in fact.

>

>Lately I've been setting up a better model to study all the

>1000+ stars catalogued by Claudius Ptolemy to get a better

>figure for his presumed or effective zero-point. It's rather

>different from any used by the Babylonians, whose work he

>must have examined. That's a bit puzzling. Some sources

>claim that Ptolemy simply added 160 arcmin to longitudes

>given by Hipparchos, which is in turn inconsistent with

>other claims that Hipparchos used a zero point near Zeta

>Piscium. Finding sources closer to " original " might resolve

>that... well, that's why I love to keep an eye on the

>comments expressed here.

----------------------------

 

Julia!!

 

....so happy that you're still here. You're wonderful with sources, so you

must have Gerd Grasshoff's THE HISTORY OF PTOLEMY'S STAR CATALOGUE (Studies

of the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences 14) which goes into the

topic of the source of Ptolemy's star positions.

 

I'm looking forward to hearing more about the model you're developing.

There's so much controversy about the precise starting point of the

sidereal zodiac. We have theory, and then we'll need the practical field

tests.

 

I've been wondering about your Mercury dasa...

 

Blessings,

Therese