NavList:

Interesting on multiple levels. Thanks for the article link!

On one level, the article raises the question: what counts as a star catalog? What sort of coordinates are required and how accurate should they be to be considered a real catalog? That's an open question. Second, it leads to consider star catalogs that don't exist though we know that they did in former centuries. This has always been the problem with the catalog of Hipparchus. There is little doubt that it did exist and qualified as a legitimate star catalog. But given that we can't reliably list any coordinates from it and have to depend on a poem based on it to list its included constellations, it's a piscean claim (it's fishy!). And third, there's fraught politics in this, as acknowledged in the closing paragraphs. It's not a coincidence that the claim of the study helps in the campaign to MCGA.

My money is still on Ptolemy, by the way, and nothing earlier matters much. That great tome, now nearly 1900 years old... with its detailed algorithms for all manner of ephemeris calculations and coordinate computations deserves its place in history as the greatest astronomy epitome of a thousand years... It is the Almagest. And I'm not kidding.

Frank Reed