[Cross-posted to i-Science]

Astronomical alignment at Segesta

There’s a couple of paper which have come out recently which use different techniques for indicating astronomical alignments at archaelogical sites. The image above is one I put together for a poster to show why horizon altitude is important as well as azimuth. It’s quite tight, so it’d be no good if you wanted to see where sunrise was in midsummer for instance, and charting the paths of astronomical bodies over a site is a problem. By and large you can treat a site as a small flat area, so there’s not usually any cartographic problems in accounting for the curvature of the earth. The sky in contrast is very curved over every archaeological site, so how to you display that in a paper?

The Megalithic Portal put me on to an interesting article published in Information Visualization: A Sky Dome visualisation for identification of astronomical orientations by Georg Zotti. The abstract includes:

This paper presents a novel diagram combining archaeological maps with a folded-apart, flattened view of the whole sky, showing the local horizon and the daily paths of the Sun, Moon and brighter stars. By use of this diagram, interesting groupings of astronomical orientation directions, for More >