Stars and their Catalogues

Throughout the ages, man has endeavoured to catalogue all that they see in the night sky. Until relatively recently, however, we were broadly incapable of maintaining an accurate record of all of the stars visible to the naked eye – they may be too faint, or too difficult to distinguish from another star nearby; they may become confused with other stars as they cross the sky. To the ancient astronomer, then, a catalogue was necessary in order to judge which star was which.

If you have some familiarity with astronomy, you may know of the Messier catalogue of 1771, which was compiled by Charles Messier in order to remove objects from the sky. Messier was a comet hunter, and discovered that many celestial objects had the appearance comets at certain times of year, and his list of 45 objects that were not comets (which he later expanded to 103) became the pattern for European star catalogues. In ancient Babylon, however, there was an equally impressive catalogue.

The MUL.APIN is a Babylonian record, containing detailed information about 71 stars and constellations in extraordinary detail. This record includes all of our modern zodiacal constellations, as well as expansive information regarding the Sun, Moon and other planets’ positions within them, not to mention enormous additional information that would bewilder the common man.

While this is obviously of interest to astronomers – being able to see the origins of their art centuries before the birth of Christ – it is also of great interest to historians, who, knowing the predilection for mapping of the stars, can rely upon such accurate records to determine the dates of other events.

For instance, a partially complete Babylonian star chart (copied from a much older record) noted a remarkable event proposed to be an asteroid impact or a near-Earth comet, and was able to provide sufficient information to provide a precise date of the 29^th of June, 3123BC. Further, it has been argued that there is sufficient information to calculate the actual trajectory of the object itself!