ASTRONOMY BACK THEN

by
  Spoorthi Shyamaprasad.


Humans have been here for around 2,00,000 years. Ever since then we have been enchanted by the night sky. In those times, the night sky was of more importance than it is now. By that I mean, the heavens weren’t just something to be admired, it was a vital part of their lives for many reasons. It was their clock, calendar and their map. Regular observations can show recurring patterns in the sky. The Lunar cycle for instance, provided the basis for a month.

They also recognized other types of patterns, the ones their minds drew on the sky, constellations. There are many myths and stories woven around these constellations. This example comes from ancient Greece. It was believed that the Pleiades, a star cluster, were actually seven sisters. Orion, the hunter, began to pursue them for their looks. He started chasing them and is still chasing them in the sky. This was just one example from the many others.

This is now a crucial part of how our ancestors used the sky. The Polaris, a star happens to be in a position such that the tilt of the Earth is almost in correspondence to its position in the sky. This meant that this star would always point north. They used the Polaris and the constellations for way -finding. In fact, it was common knowledge to know the stars and the planets in the sky back then.

It is natural that they incorporated these patterns into their monuments. Many such as the Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Giza, many Maya monuments etc were built on astronomical foundations.

If you look at the night sky, the stars, the planets, all seem to revolve around you. Its possible that you may say that the sky revolves around you. That is what people earlier thought. The geocentric model of the universe places the Earth at the center of the Universe with everything else revolving around it. Ptolemy was a thinker who lived in the 2nd C. He developed the geocentric model by making changes. If you observe the motion of the planets over a period of time, there will be a time when you notice that the planets follow a retrograde motion ( reverse path in the sky). To somehow make a little sense of this, Ptolemy included in his model a complex system of spheres. It took him 47 circles to explain the motion of just 7 planets.

This was the model of the universe followed until Copernicus, who proposed the Heliocentric model of the universe. The retrograde motion of planets seemed to make perfect sense in this model. In certain times of the year, the Earth would overtake the planets leading to their backward motion in the sky. Our view of the universe has never been the same since then

I hope I was able to brief you up about astronomy back then..

Thanks for reading

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