Message #31528

[Bianca]

A guy vacationing in Naples has stumbled across one of the most desperately sought pieces of ancient scholarship, long thought lost forever when the great Library of Alexandria Egypt was destroyed around 400 AD.

Apparently, it had been right in front of millions of tourists for centuries.

A statue of Atlas carrying the Universe on his shoulders turns out to have used the lost celestial globe of Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer who first discovered the precession of Earth’s axis, observed a nova, precisely calculated the length of the year, and invented the stellar brightness scale used today.

And he also made this newly-rediscovered, amazingly accurate star map, complete with celestial equator, ecliptic, and Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.