Nova Scotia's Church Star Map Mystery
Source: wunderkabinett.co.uk
Parishioners at one of Canada's oldest Anglican churches will be puzzled by an enduring enigma when they gaze heavenward this Christmas.
The conundrum emerged after the church, built in 1754, burned on Halloween night in 2001 as a result of arson. The parish sought to reconstruct the building's interior as closely as possible, and it brought in parishioner Margaret Coolen in 2004 to re-create the ceiling over the altar.But the church didn't have a complete set of photographs of the original star pattern, so Coolen, hoping the pattern reflected the actual alignment of heavenly bodies in the night sky, sought the help of astronomer David Turner of Saint Mary's University in Halifax.
That's when the first mystery emerged.
Turner recognized the constellation Perseus in the photos of the eastern part of the chancel ceiling. But Perseus, seen from Lunenburg, always lies in the northern part of the sky and never due east.
"We looked at them and didn't recognize any of the star groups," Coolen explained of the constellations' positions. "It looked like they might just simply be put up at random, but it didn't seem like someone would go to that trouble to put just random stars on the ceiling."
Coolen suggested that Turner instead look at the stars' alignment around 2,000 years ago — on Christmas Eve in the year of Jesus' birth.
Then, using software that plots the positions of heavenly bodies throughout history, Turner had a revelation: The chancel ceiling's pattern indeed reflected quite closely how the night sky would have looked from Lunenburg all those years past, when constellations appeared in somewhat different locations than today.
"I set the scene for sunset, and bingo! I found myself looking at Perseus in the eastern sky," he said.
A discovery Channel piece on the mystery:
I assume that, even before the age of computers, it would have been possible to work out the positions of stars - the ancients seemed to have know about precession after all. However, it would still have been an impressive undertaking and one that was, apparently, not noted or remembered despite the amount of planning or effort that had gone into it. Also worth nosing through the comments as someone there points us to this page which explains how the church has been remodelled over the years and the ceiling was actually painted by a woman with the surname Page, in 1860. Not that this diminishes the achievement but it keeps the facts straight.
That said, somewhere Dan Brown is stroking his chin trying to work out how he can work this up into a new book, probably throwing in the Oak Island Money Pit [Buried Treasure] for good measure, and perhaps even Roanoke [The Lost Colony].
Article from: Wunderkabinett.co.uk
Click here for a virtual tour of the renovated church interior. (Use cursor to pan and zoom)
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