Part of the long-lost star catalogue of Hipparchus found in medieval parchment

&gt; The phenomenon of precession — in which Earth slowly wobbles on its axis by around one degree every 72 years — means that the position of the fixed stars slowly shifts in the sky. The researchers were able to use this to check when the ancient astronomer must have made his observations, and found that the coordinates fit roughly 129 bc — during the time when Hipparchus was working.<p>That&#x27;s amazing, using the discovered results themselves to step backwards and find out when the observations were made.

Paper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.sagepub.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1177&#x2F;00218286221128289" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.sagepub.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1177&#x2F;00218286221128289</a>

I&#x27;m slightly annoyed by the description &quot;first known map of night sky&quot; because medieval is late, and there must be some cave paintings or carved stones with the sun and the moon at least. And &quot;first known&quot; must mean &quot;earliest surviving&quot;, because wouldn&#x27;t there have been a few maps in the Library at Alexandria? What about China?<p>It&#x27;s Hipparchus which dates the original, and doesn&#x27;t make what it is less cool, but my brain thirsts for a little more clarity&#x2F;context in the headline.

It&#x27;s surprising that no one has applied ML techniques to historical documents like these. Scanning the documents to uncover some text that was overwritten would be a very useful technique for historical research. Written documents have very distinct statistical properties and if there is a big enough corpus of text then it would be easy to train a classifier to uncover the statistical properties that are not clearly visible but still have the distinct statistical signature of written text.<p>Presumably we are on the verge of AGI so this seems like a very easy application.

One day, the Vatican vaults will be cracked open, and the amount of history we&#x27;ll be able to piece together that we&#x27;ve been denied for centuries will make people shake their heads in disbelief.

It&#x27;s not a map but a catalogue with coordinates.

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