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68r1 and 2 - Andrew Harrington - 11-09-2017
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.
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.
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.
RE: 68r1 and 2 - VViews - 11-09-2017
Hi Andrew Harrington and welcome to the forum!
"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. "
This is an interesting observation! I don't think I've read that anywhere before. Well spotted!
"Based on these assumptions I tried to map out the stars."
Also interesting... Do you think you could post a picture of the modern star map with the f68 stars marked on it? I would like to see how this looks!
RE: 68r1 and 2 - Anton - 11-09-2017
That's a great observation about f58r. Indeed, it seems to introduce three classes of "Voynich stars":
a) six-pointed, ochre in the centre
b) seven-pointed, circle in the centre
c) eight-pointed, circle in the centre
Next step would be to carefully check f68r1 and r2 to see whether the charts are comprised of these three classes exclusively. A quick glance shows me that in respect to the unlabeled circumference stars in f68r2 that's not true: e.g. there are seven-pointed ochre-centered stars. But the circumference may be decorative only. However, there is e.g. a seven pointed ochre star there (ochory).
But, if I'm not mistaken, we have some folios lost after f58v?
About the tail, I'm not so sure that it relates to a class, because tails are belonging to different stars in the Zodiac section.
I also would be careful about charts representing star maps. Voynich "stars" may represent not actual stars, but something different. However, this separation into classes may provide further hints.
RE: 68r1 and 2 - -JKP- - 12-09-2017
There's a thread about the different treatment of stars possibly representing levels of brightness.
RE: 68r1 and 2 - Helmut Winkler - 12-09-2017
Seems to have ben common practice for star maps, clm 826 (about the same time) has stars of different sizes and numbers of arms for different degrees of brightness
RE: 68r1 and 2 - Andrew Harrington - 12-09-2017
VViews
I think that putting the Voynich stars on to a modern star map would make a good next stage. It would be better than visualising the stars on the map and could help identify discrepancies,
Andy
RE: 68r1 and 2 - Anton - 12-09-2017
(12-09-2017, 08:46 AM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Seems to have ben common practice for star maps, clm 826 (about the same time) has stars of different sizes and numbers of arms for different degrees of brightness
Has there been any tradition to group stars into distinct classes according to degrees of brightness, and to assign separate significance to those classes?
RE: 68r1 and 2 - MarcoP - 12-09-2017
Many thanks to Andrew for sharing his original approach to these two diagrams! Years ago, the two “star maps” were extensively discussed on the site of Stephen Bax. A user wrote You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
Johannes Klein Wrote:Hypothesis: The number of tips on a star drawn in 68r1 and 68r2 represent some form of category of stars. What comes to my mind at first would be brightness/magnitude.
Remains to be tested.
I don't think the idea has ever been investigated in any detail.
(12-09-2017, 02:34 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(12-09-2017, 08:46 AM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Seems to have ben common practice for star maps, clm 826 (about the same time) has stars of different sizes and numbers of arms for different degrees of brightness
Has there been any tradition to group stars into distinct classes according to degrees of brightness, and to assign separate significance to those classes?
Stars were already grouped into six different mangnitudes in Ptolemy's catalog (in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
Helmut's observation makes Andrew's proposal even more relevant. I don't know if digital images of the whole Clm 826 (Prague, 1400 ca) are available online, but here is an illustration of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., compared with the corresponding illustration by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1570). I think these two images make clear the correctness of Helmut's remark.
These are all the Perseus stars of magnitude 2 and 3 listed by Piccolomini (magnitude 2 is “larger” that magnitude 3). The other stars are smaller (magnitude 4):
A 2 Right side [alpha, Algenib / Mirfak]
B 2 In the head of Medusa [beta , Algol]
C 3 Tip of the left foot
D 3 Right shoulder [gamma]
E 3 One of three in the right side
F 3 Left knee [epsilon]
G 3 In the left heel
As you can see, both manuscripts represent lesser stars with small 6-pointed stars. In both illustrations, the two brightest stars (A and B) are 8-pointed and marked with different colors. Magnitude 3 stars are treated differently in the two sources: Piccolomini marks them with 6-pointed stars larger than those used for magnitude 4.
Clm 826 uses 8-pointed stars for two of them (D and F, in Piccolomini's atlas); I highlighted these in blue. C and G (in the left foot) are marked as smaller stars and E seems not to have been included. I have mirrored the manuscript illustration to make it more easily comparable with Piccolomini's: ancient illustrations often represent the sky in "God's perspective", as seen from outside the sphere of the fixed stars.
On Islamic globes, stars of different magnitudes were marked with dots of different sizes. Also the Arabic Al-Sufi manuscripts (from which Clm 826 derives) represented stars with small circles. This notation is also used in modern star maps.
RE: 68r1 and 2 - ReneZ - 12-09-2017
(12-09-2017, 02:50 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Johannes Klein Wrote:Hypothesis: The number of tips on a star drawn in 68r1 and 68r2 represent some form of category of stars. What comes to my mind at first would be brightness/magnitude.
Remains to be tested.
I don't think the idea has ever been investigated in any detail.
I have looked at this in great detail for the stars in the zodiac illustrations, some time before 2000.
Here, stars have 6, 7, 8 or 9 points.
The working hypothesis was that the brightest stars have 9 points, and the least bright ones 6 points.
I found a number of very interesting features, but could not make a sufficiently convincing match.
In the end I could neither prove nor reject the hypothesis.
I was working with Ptolemy's catalogue, for magnitudes but also for longitude.
I was looking for copies of the catalogues of Al-Sufi and Ulugh Beg, but never found any.
This hypothesis has been in hibernation ever since.
Basically, if one assigns the stars to the degrees of the zodiac, either using longitude, or co-rising (paranatellonta), one gets charts that are essentially similar to the ones in the MS, but only qualitatively. It's as if the Voynich zodiac just 'looks like' such a chart, but isn't a real one.
RE: 68r1 and 2 - Helmut Winkler - 12-09-2017
BSB clm 826: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.