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(This cross-fade montage shows a detail of the palimpsest under ordinary lighting; under multispectral analysis; and with a reconstruction of the hidden text.Credit: Museum of the Bible (CC BY-SA 4.0). Photo by Early Manuscripts Electronic Library/Lazarus Project, University of Rochester; multispectral processing by Keith T. Knox; tracings by Emanuel Zingg.) Scholars have been searching for what is believed to be the first map of the nighttime sky for centuries, and now they have finally found the medieval parchment hidden beneath Christian texts from the library at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the...

...The manuscript originated from the Greek Orthodox St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, but most of its 146 foils are now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, Nature reports....the Codex Climaci Rescriptus is palimpsest, which is a parchment that was scraped clean of older text by the scribe so that it could be reused - technique to save paper...The astronomical information describes star-origin myths by Eratosthenes and parts of a famous third-century-BC poem called Phaenomena that was written by Aratus of Soli and also highlights constellations.Peter Williams, a biblical expert and lecturer on Hebrew...

Explanation: Few star clusters are seen to be so close to each other. Some 7,000 light-years away, though, this pair of open or galactic star clusters is an easy binocular target, a lovely starfield in the northern constellation Perseus. Also visible to the unaided eye from dark sky areas, it was cataloged in 130 BC by Greek astronomer Hipparchus. Now known as h and chi Persei, or NGC 869 (above right) and NGC 884, the clusters themselves are separated by only a few hundred light-years and contain stars much younger and hotter than the Sun. In addition to being physically...

Studying a statue of Atlas holding the sky, an American astronomer finds key evidence of what could be a major fraud in science history. In a sunlit gallery of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Italy, astronomer Brad Schaefer came face to face with an ancient statue known as the Farnese Atlas. For centuries, the 7-foot marble figure of the mythological Atlas has bent in stoic agony with a sphere of the cosmos crushing his shoulders. Carved on the sphere - one of only three celestial globes that have survived from Greco-Roman times - are figures representing 41 of the 48...

The Antikythera mechanism was an arrangement of calibrated differential gears inscribed and configured to produce solar and lunar positions in synchronization with the calendar year. By rotating a shaft protruding from its now-disintegrated wooden case, its owner could read on its front and back dials the progressions of the lunar and synodic months over four-year cycles. He could predict the movement of heavenly bodies regardless of his local government's erratic calendar. From the accumulated inscriptions and the position of the gears and year-ring, Price deduced that the device was linked closely to Geminus of Rhodes, and had been built on...