AlunSalt

“Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another” – Plato

  • Recent Posts

    • Starlight Expressed

      This very briefly introduces the statistical method I used to analyse the Greek temples of Sicily for astronomical alignments. It’ll be the basis for a paper On the Orientations of Greek Temples in Sicily. The whole thesis will be made available later via Open Access some way or another. I would say via the British [...]

    • Portable Antiquities Data and Swivel

      I’m falling behind on my reading of RSS feeds, so the news that the Portable Antiquities Scheme has put some of its data on Swivel is new to me, even though the post is a week old. Swivel seems to be a graphing website. People upload data and then you can draw your own graphs [...]

    • The Tomb of Jesus

      Carl Feagans mentions the Tomb of Jesus brouhaha. I plan to put up something on this, but I’m holding back for now as I’m waiting for a couple of email replies. I’ve sent one to Professor who produced the 600:1 claim. I’ve tried seeing the press conference to see how he gets that figure, but [...]

    • Roman Camps and Orientations

      A follow-up to The Orientation of Roman Camps and Forts. This is an application of the Binomial Distribution test that I’m using in my own work applied to the data from the original paper, which is why you may have the impression you’ve already read this recently. My analysis may not be correct, so I’m [...]

    • Do Greek temples in Sicily face the rising sun?

      In a previous post I looked at whether or not Greek temples faced East. The definition I used of East was very broad, the eastern half of the sky. No-one, as far as I know, has suggested that this was sufficient for the Greeks. Penrose, writing in the late nineteenth century and Dinsmoor in the [...]

    • The probability of a temple facing East

      So this is what I’ve been working on this week. I’ve been looking at the orientations of Greek temples. There is an idea that Greek temples always face east, and that’s what I’m testing at the moment. If I can show that Greek temples do face East then things get interesting. This is because in [...]

    • The Scale of Likelihood

      I thought it might be useful to define what I mean when I use words like ‘probable’ or ‘possible’, so I’ve created my own scale to define how likely I think something is to be significant. It’s meant for whether or not an astronomical correlation is meaningful to archaeological material, but it probably has general [...]