NavList:

Two days ago, I was looking at small islands that didn't make the cut in a dataset I maintain. Exploring around Greece and making a list of little bits in the Aegean, down near Crete I came upon an island and realized it was Antikythera (the barren island between Crete and Kythera). This small island is, of course, famous mostly because it is home to what is probably the most impressive horde of "treasure" found in a Classical Greek shipwreck. The treasure includes numerous astounding works of art, statues, etc. and also the extraordinary device now known as the Antikythera mechanism, which made its way into the last "Indiana Jones" movie last year as the "dial of destiny", a time travel machine. Hmmm... It probably doesn't do that!

Seeing Antikythera inspired me to watch an old episode of the PBS science show "NOVA" which I first watched some years ago. It's an interesting documentary, maybe a bit narcissistic, but a fascinating exploration of the process that led to the most extensive decoding and interpretation of the Antikythera mechanism. It's a small, detailed "orrery" --a mechanical model of the "cosmos" that correctly and accurately calculates the positions of the planets (probably) and certainly the phases of the Moon and the dates of eclipses. I recommend the documentary, and if you watch it, you may notice, as I did, a little video segment with some animated gears painted into a starry sky, and a graphic of an astronomer using something like a cross-staff to observe the stars. At first, it's tough to figure out what stars we're looking at, but then things start jumping out...

I'm attaching four images below. Two are direct screen captures from the documentary. Puzzle over those if you want to figure out the sky yourself. I can see at least four navigation stars, but they're not easy. I'm also including two "keys" with a number of stars marked. I selected a handful of stars on a whim. Some are my favorites, and some relatively faint stars with interesting stories behind them. I also marked a "+" for a key location in celestial coordinates. And there is one remaining puzzle for the adventurous: what is that very bright object in the second frame, and, in order to figure that out, what is the date of the images?

Note that I have changed the smaller previews for the second pair of images so that you can choose when to look at them. If you want to figure it out yourself, don't look at the key images right away. If you have no patience for that, then you can look immediately :).

Frank Reed

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