"I'm at the peak of my excitement right now, lead scholar Victor Gysembergh of the French National Centre for Scientific Research said Wednesday morning as he watched imagery appear on a computer screen beside the lead-walled room where the accelerator's X-ray beam probed one of the 22 pages. We just have line after line of text showing up, in ancient Greek from the astronomical manuscript. I'm hoping to see the first star coordinates pop up."
"The copied star map is believed to have been erased around the 10th Century, and the goat- or sheep-skin parchment pages a valuable commodity in the medieval world ended up at St. Catherine's Monastery at the base of Mount Sinai, where monks overwrote them with Christian teachings. In 2012, an undergraduate student working on a summer project at the University of Cambridge found among the 200 or so pages of the Christian manuscript called the Codex Climaci Rescript"
Researchers focused a powerful X-ray machine at SLAC on parchments from a medieval Sinai monastery to reveal a high-quality copy of Hipparchus's lost star catalogue. Hipparchus compiled a catalogue more than 2,100 years ago that listed over 800 celestial bodies by brightness and position and included constellation illustrations. The copy is believed to have been inscribed around the 6th century, later erased around the 10th century, and overwritten with Christian text at St. Catherine's Monastery. Portions were discovered within the Codex Climaci Rescript in 2012, and imaging now aims to recover star coordinates and illuminate early astronomy.
Read at www.mercurynews.com
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