World’s oldest and newest star maps

This is, or may well be, the oldest:

The caption to this image from today’s Guardian says:

“Heiko Breuer, a conservator from the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Germany, shows off the Nebra Sky Disc, the world’s oldest map of the stars, which will be displayed at the British Museum’s Stonehenge exhibition (17 Feb – 17 July). Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA”

The bronze disc, almost a foot wide, has its green patina decorated in gold with what surely are the sun, crescent moon, stars including a group of seven (the Pleiades?), and arcs that could be horizon or ecliptic or Milky Way or rainbow. It was illegally dug up in 1999, along with bronze swords, axes, chisels, and spiral bracelets, by two men hunting with metal detectors, presumably near Nebra in Saxony-Anhalt, and sold to a dealer, so its archaeological context was lost, and its dating to about 1000 BC is uncertain.

And the newest

Our Map of the Starry Sky,

and Astronomical Calendar 2022. Here are the sky scenes for the last few days of this month:

There’s a lot going on – don’t miss it!

New Normals department

That’s become a buzz phrase. There is much talk of what will become of normality as we continue to live with the virus.

Our friend Angela Phelan has written a wildly allegorical story about a child born with two eyes – a deformity in a society where one eye is – like one nose and one mouth – the norm. But how many ears do her imaginary people have?

We need to evolve three sets of ears. The single pair was called on to support pencils, then glasses, then sunglasses, then hearing aids. And now they all get tangled up with the strings of anti-virus masks.

More ears needed! It’s happened before, it could happen again: Davy Crockett had a left ear and  a right ear and a wild front ier.

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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.