11-09-2017, 09:25 PM
Hello
First post…The following is an explanation of how I generated a possible solution to 68r1 and 68r2 in the manuscript. I’m not sure if anyone has done this before (I can’t believe it) but I hope you like it anyway. If not then I’ve wasted a few hours on a rainy Saturday.
Andy Harrington
58f and 58r indicate that stars with different numbers of arms or a tail are different. There are 4 paragraphs, each with a single star with either 6, 7, 8 arms or a trail. I suspect that each paragraph is about the nature of the relevant star. I don’t know what each paragraph says, but this solution is about 67r1 and r2 so I don’t care at present. The important thing is that they look deliberately different.
So looking at 67r1 I made the following assumptions:
More arms mean a brighter star. This is common sense and similar to modern star maps which show brighter stars bigger.
The stars should be viewed as being on a sphere that rotates about the earth. (Medieval view of the universe).
The page represents the top half of the sphere (see below)
The star in the dead centre of 67r1 is the star in the top of the sphere that does not move (ie Polaris). You can see the pin hole in the centre of the star where the compass was rotated to draw the feint outer circle so it is deliberately put in the centre. Since all the other stars move about, there isn’t any other one a sensible person would stick in the middle.
Based on these assumptions I tried to map out the stars.
I took a modern star map (Phillips Star Chart) and put stickers on it for the top 10 brightest stars and those used for navigation. The real stars are pretty much the same as in the 15th century and people’s eyes are the same so it is reasonable to assume that significant stars could be the same.
Then I marked the stars with 8 arms on a copy of the manuscript page and tried to see if it was similar to the marked up map. It wasn’t the same until I rotated one of the maps by 35 degrees. Then the manuscript stars with 8 arms were a pretty good match for the brightest stars in the Northern sky. Vega wasn’t represented but there was one star with seven arms and a black circle in the centre in the right place. The rest was just a matter of looking at the star chart and identifying stars on the manuscript based upon the position of the stars with 8 arms. The further the stars identified are from the big, bright stars the less reliable the names are. Particularly around the edges of the page, the star names may need some work to confirm or reallocate them- they are at a “best fit” stage.
[attachment=1657]
I also tried rotating the map against the manuscript all the way around and also with a reversed manuscript. No other angle worked.
So what do the faces mean? I guess that the one with a yellow toothed circle around represents the top of the star sphere. The yellow teeth could represent light providing the force to turn the sphere. The face at the bottom represents the star sphere’s equator. The 2 faces symbolise what the map between them is about.
On the next page 67r2 there is a similar map with a similar face to the equator at the top and a similar face to the yellow toothed face at the bottom (but edged with some darker teeth). If we assume that this symbolises that the map is of the bottom half of the star sphere then it should be possible to plot the real stars on this map as for the previous page. There is only one star with 8 points so I had to use the stars with 7 instead. I tried this with the normal page and the page backwards. There were 2 possible solutions. The one which looked like the modern Southern star map rotated by 35 degrees seemed the best based upon the bright stars and the blank areas in the sky. It is much harder to line up the stars as the observer probably won’t have seen the most Southerly real ones- so they might not be included. For example, Sirius could be one of 2 positions and the 8 pointed star could be Acamar (with Achernar below it) or Achernar with (Canopus below it in the wrong place). However, Rigel at 10:30 clock position looks good and Nunki-Kaus Australis-Shaula and Sabik look like a good match to me.
[attachment=1658]
So does it work?
I’ve taken the marked up manuscript out at night with the star map and it seemed to be pretty good for the Northern stars I looked at. I think there is a strong chance that these 2 pages are a representation of the Northern and Southern stars. (But a smart man once saw canals on Mars, so confirmation bias is easy to fall in to!)
Does it help with translation of the rest of the manuscript?
Maybe. But that is beyond me at present. It may give you a list of identifiable stars to Voynich words which is a starting point. It could be used to confirm whether a decryption method works.
First post…The following is an explanation of how I generated a possible solution to 68r1 and 68r2 in the manuscript. I’m not sure if anyone has done this before (I can’t believe it) but I hope you like it anyway. If not then I’ve wasted a few hours on a rainy Saturday.
Andy Harrington
58f and 58r indicate that stars with different numbers of arms or a tail are different. There are 4 paragraphs, each with a single star with either 6, 7, 8 arms or a trail. I suspect that each paragraph is about the nature of the relevant star. I don’t know what each paragraph says, but this solution is about 67r1 and r2 so I don’t care at present. The important thing is that they look deliberately different.
So looking at 67r1 I made the following assumptions:
More arms mean a brighter star. This is common sense and similar to modern star maps which show brighter stars bigger.
The stars should be viewed as being on a sphere that rotates about the earth. (Medieval view of the universe).
The page represents the top half of the sphere (see below)
The star in the dead centre of 67r1 is the star in the top of the sphere that does not move (ie Polaris). You can see the pin hole in the centre of the star where the compass was rotated to draw the feint outer circle so it is deliberately put in the centre. Since all the other stars move about, there isn’t any other one a sensible person would stick in the middle.
Based on these assumptions I tried to map out the stars.
I took a modern star map (Phillips Star Chart) and put stickers on it for the top 10 brightest stars and those used for navigation. The real stars are pretty much the same as in the 15th century and people’s eyes are the same so it is reasonable to assume that significant stars could be the same.
Then I marked the stars with 8 arms on a copy of the manuscript page and tried to see if it was similar to the marked up map. It wasn’t the same until I rotated one of the maps by 35 degrees. Then the manuscript stars with 8 arms were a pretty good match for the brightest stars in the Northern sky. Vega wasn’t represented but there was one star with seven arms and a black circle in the centre in the right place. The rest was just a matter of looking at the star chart and identifying stars on the manuscript based upon the position of the stars with 8 arms. The further the stars identified are from the big, bright stars the less reliable the names are. Particularly around the edges of the page, the star names may need some work to confirm or reallocate them- they are at a “best fit” stage.
[attachment=1657]
I also tried rotating the map against the manuscript all the way around and also with a reversed manuscript. No other angle worked.
So what do the faces mean? I guess that the one with a yellow toothed circle around represents the top of the star sphere. The yellow teeth could represent light providing the force to turn the sphere. The face at the bottom represents the star sphere’s equator. The 2 faces symbolise what the map between them is about.
On the next page 67r2 there is a similar map with a similar face to the equator at the top and a similar face to the yellow toothed face at the bottom (but edged with some darker teeth). If we assume that this symbolises that the map is of the bottom half of the star sphere then it should be possible to plot the real stars on this map as for the previous page. There is only one star with 8 points so I had to use the stars with 7 instead. I tried this with the normal page and the page backwards. There were 2 possible solutions. The one which looked like the modern Southern star map rotated by 35 degrees seemed the best based upon the bright stars and the blank areas in the sky. It is much harder to line up the stars as the observer probably won’t have seen the most Southerly real ones- so they might not be included. For example, Sirius could be one of 2 positions and the 8 pointed star could be Acamar (with Achernar below it) or Achernar with (Canopus below it in the wrong place). However, Rigel at 10:30 clock position looks good and Nunki-Kaus Australis-Shaula and Sabik look like a good match to me.
[attachment=1658]
So does it work?
I’ve taken the marked up manuscript out at night with the star map and it seemed to be pretty good for the Northern stars I looked at. I think there is a strong chance that these 2 pages are a representation of the Northern and Southern stars. (But a smart man once saw canals on Mars, so confirmation bias is easy to fall in to!)
Does it help with translation of the rest of the manuscript?
Maybe. But that is beyond me at present. It may give you a list of identifiable stars to Voynich words which is a starting point. It could be used to confirm whether a decryption method works.