Jesse Rogerson

He would go out, he would observe the sky, and he made very meticulously drawn maps, according to lore.

Now, his original maps of the sky have been lost, but they were copied and changed and added to by other philosophers of the time, Ptolemy and Al-Sufi, to name a couple.

But the original maps of Hipparchus have apparently not been seen.

So enter this group.

What they did is they, what people used to do is they used to reuse parchment paper, parchment, you know, if nobody's been using it for a while, they would like use some chemicals, they would wash off all the ink and then they would write over top of it.

And so they've been, this group has been

looking at all these old ancient parchments and finding and seeing that there's, there is, you can see it with your eyes that there's stuff smudged on there from like the last time it was used.

But how do you like get the information out?

And they use a technique called x-ray fluorescence.

And they, the different inks light up in different ways depending on the light that you hit on it.

And if you do it in the correct way, you can see like layer one, layer two, layer three, layer four, all the way down.

My favorite result so far is that they found Hipparchus' catalog.

They found that it was as precise as someone would have said from hundreds of years ago, so the lore lived up.

But what I really love about this story is you have Hipparchus' maps

And then you can compare them to Ptolemy's maps and see what was taken and what was changed and what was added.

You can see the growth of the knowledge from one generation to the next.

And that is an important step that we were missing, is how was science evolving of the sky over hundreds of years?

And now we have a big piece of the puzzle, Hipparchus' map.

No worries.

Always happy to be here.