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In the shadow of the Moon
New Scientist ^ | 30 January 1999 | editors

Posted on 08/31/2004 8:42:25 AM PDT by SunkenCiv

At 8.45 on the morning of 15 April 136 BC, Babylon was plunged into darkness when the Moon passed in front of the Sun. An astrologer, who recorded the details in cuneiform characters on a clay tablet, wrote: "At 24 degrees after sunrise-a solar eclipse. When it began on the southwest side, Venus, Mercury and the normal stars were visible. Jupiter and Mars, which were in their period of disappearance, became visible. The Sun threw off the shadow from southwest to northeast." If present-day astronomers use a computer to run the movements of the Earth, Moon and Sun backwards from their present positions, like a movie in reverse, they find something very odd. The total eclipse of 15 April 136 BC should not have been visible from Babylon at all. The zone of totality should have passed over the Spanish island of Mallorca, 48.8 degrees west of Babylon-a difference of more than one-eighth of a complete rotation of the Earth, or 3.25 hours. The only explanation is that the planet's rotation has slowed since 136 BC, making the day longer. Of course, there are many other records of the ancients observing cosmic events, from supernovas to comets, but the value of these sightings to modern science is limited. Reports of eclipses, however, are in a class of their own. If the Earth has accumulated a change in orientation equivalent to an eighth of a turn in just over 2000 years, then we can infer that the day has lengthened by an average of a few milliseconds a century. This is an extraordinarily precise figure to deduce from historical records. In fact, it is without precedent.

(Excerpt) Read more at web.archive.org ...


TOPICS: Books/Literature; Reference; Religion; Science; Weird Stuff
KEYWORDS: archaeoastronomy; archaeology; asteroid; astronomy; babylon; babylong; catastrophism; cruithne; cuneiform; davidrohl; earth; eclipse; epigraphyandlanguage; ggg; glaciation; godsgravesglyphs; history; isostaticrebound; jupiter; lunarcapture; lunarorigin; mallorca; mars; mercury; minimoon; minimoons; moon; quasisatellite; quasisatellites; rohl; solareclipse; sothic; sothis; space; spain; themoon; toutatis; venus
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Moon Phases 5000 yr catalog:
http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/phase/phasecat.html


41 posted on 03/06/2005 11:14:39 PM PST by SunkenCiv (last updated my FreeRepublic profile on Sunday, February 20, 2005.)
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For those who dunno, Fomenko is a Russian mathemetician who claims that European history is a mere echo of Russian / Byzantine Greek history; among other things, that the Bronze Age didn't exist; that Christ was really el Cid, and born in the 11th century.
Ptolemy's Almagest and Fomenko's Opinion About It
and Especially: Some Words About Precession

by B. Lukács
"PTOLEMY'S CRIME"?

This title comes from Newton (but not I. but R. R.), whose book has the title "The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy" [11]. His claim goes back to Delambre (1819) who believed that Ptolemy fabricated some solar eclipse data without observing the eclipses. I cannot decide if Ptolemy falsified or not and do not want to.

Another accusations from the 80's tell that Ptolemy's Stellar Catalog contains a lot of stars whose positions he did not observe. The idea is the following. Hipparchus discovered the precession. Then Ptolemy calculated that the precession between Hipparchus and himself must be 2°40', and for a lot of stars he simply took Hipparchus' positions + this precession shift while he declared that he reobserved them. The modern authors claim that they detected this practice from anomalous distribution of measurement errors + lack of any peculiar motion (which did not exist in Greek theory) + the incorrect value of precession. The literature is big, not unequivocal but fairly convincing.
See message #1 of this thread.

42 posted on 03/30/2005 8:51:13 AM PST by SunkenCiv (last updated my FreeRepublic profile on Friday, March 25, 2005.)
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Posted on 10/04/2004 10:31:59 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
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Various - See Text | 16 FEB 2003 | Various
Posted on 02/16/2003 2:16:44 PM PST by vannrox
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43 posted on 08/20/2005 6:09:56 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Down with Dhimmicrats! I last updated by FR profile on Sunday, August 14, 2005.)
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Catastrophism

44 posted on 03/26/2006 8:11:58 PM PST by SunkenCiv (Yes indeed, Civ updated his profile and links pages again, on Monday, March 6, 2006.)
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Historical eclipses and earths rotation

45 posted on 09/15/2006 11:28:00 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (updated my FR profile on Saturday, September 2, 2006. https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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· join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic · subscribe ·

 
Gods
Graves
Glyphs
Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution.
 
Catastrophism
 
· join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · subscribe ·
 
To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.
GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
 

·Dogpile · Archaeologica · LiveScience · Archaeology · Biblical Archaeology Society ·
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· The Archaeology Channel · Excerpt, or Link only? · cgk's list of ping lists ·


46 posted on 03/31/2010 8:13:10 PM PDT by SunkenCiv ("Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others." -- Otto von Bismarck)
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Note: this topic is from 08/31/2004. This is just an update to the ping message for two lists.

47 posted on 06/20/2016 9:57:13 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (I'll tell you what's wrong with society -- no one drinks from the skulls of their enemies anymore.)
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https://epdf.pub/queue/historical-eclipses-and-earths-rotation.html


48 posted on 03/01/2024 12:38:10 AM PST by SunkenCiv (Putin should skip ahead to where he kills himself in the bunker.)
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This topic was posted 8/31/2004, update.

49 posted on 04/16/2024 12:48:07 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Putin should skip ahead to where he kills himself in the bunker.)
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This topic was posted 8/31/2004, update.



50 posted on 04/16/2024 12:48:33 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Putin should skip ahead to where he kills himself in the bunker.)
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