NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2006 Jun 13, 01:19 -0400
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2006 Jun 13, 01:19 -0400
The existing theory (before the recent scanning) is that this is a miniature planetarium, some reference to such devises survive in the work of Archimedes, if I do not mistake. It was supposed to show the relative positions of the Sun, Moon and planets for a given day and time. There is a model of the reverse-engineered mechanism displayed nearby, reflecting these theories. But the new scanning possibly revealed new information. Whatever its function was, it is an amazing piece of engineering and wormanship. Alex On Tue, 13 Jun 2006, Frank Reed wrote: > > Dan Allen wrote: > "On June 6, 2006 it was announced that the imaging system had enabled > much more of the Greek inscription to be viewed and translated, from > about 1,000 characters that were visible previously, to about 2,000 > characters, representing about 95% of the complete text. " > > That story caught my eye, too, and I'm looking forward to hearing what the > text says. Probably something disappointingly mundane like "turn the crank to > see the Moon's phases", but ya never know... > > -FER > 42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W. > www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars >