Discovery of extracts from a lost astronomical catalog

A leaflet from the Codex Climaci Rescriptus © Peter Malik - Hipparchus' star catalog is the earliest known attempt to accurately determine the positions of fixed stars. Researchers have just found fragments of this missing text in an old manuscript. They show that Hipparchus' data were significantly more accurate than those of another catalog composed centuries later. Researchers from CNRS, Sorbonne University and Tyndale House affiliated to the University of Cambridge have just found fragments of the star catalog composed by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus during the 2nd century BC. These texts had been erased from a manuscript to reuse pages in the medieval period and could be uncovered using multispectral imaging technologies. The study of these extracts, published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy on October 18, 2022, sheds new light on astronomy in antiquity. Old grimoires can contain coveted secrets, even by the most Cartesian minds.