El Castillo pyramid lit up during the night under a stellar sky in Chichen Itza, Mexico, among the biggest Maya cities. (Image credit: Matteo Colombo/DigitalVision by means of Getty Images)
We reside in a light-polluted world, where streetlamps, electronic advertisements and even yard lighting block out all however the brightest celestial things in the night sky. Travel to a formally secured “Dark Sky” location, look skyward and be impressed.
This is the view of the paradises individuals had for centuries. Pre-modern societies enjoyed the sky and developed cosmographies, maps of the skies that supplied info for calendars and farming cycles. They likewise produced cosmologies, which, in the initial usage of the word, were religions to describe deep space. The gods and the paradises were inseparable.
The skies are organized and cyclical in nature, so see and tape-record enough time and you will identify their rhythms. Lots of societies had the ability to precisely forecast lunar eclipses, and some might likewise forecast solar eclipses — like the one that will take place over North America on April 8, 2024.
Related: Why I’m staying at home for the April 8 solar eclipse
The course of totality, where the Moon will completely obstruct the Sun, will cross into Mexico on the Pacific coast before going into the United States in Texas, where I teach the history of innovation and science, and will be viewed as a partial eclipse throughout the lands of the ancient Maya. This follows the October 2023 annular eclipse, when it was possible to observe the “ring of fire” around the Sun from lots of ancient Maya ruins and parts of Texas.
A centuries earlier, 2 such solar eclipses over the exact same location within 6 months would have seen Maya astronomers, priests and rulers jump into a craze of activity. I have actually seen a comparable craze– albeit for various factors– here in the Dallas-Fort Worth location, where we will remain in the course of totality. Throughout this duration in between the 2 eclipses, I have actually felt fortunate to share my interest in the history of astronomy with trainees and the neighborhood.
Ancient astronomers
Eclipse panels in the Dresden Codex. (Image credit: Saxon State and University Library – Dresden)
The ancient Maya were probably among the best sky-watching
societies. Achieved mathematicians, they taped methodical observations on the movement of the Sun, worlds and stars.
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From these observations, they produced a intricate calendar system to control their world– among the most precise of pre-modern times.
Astronomers carefully observed the Sun and lined up significant structures, such as pyramids, to track solstices and equinoxes. They likewise made use of these structures, in addition to caverns and wells, to mark the zenith days — the 2 times a year in the tropics where the Sun is straight overhead and vertical things cast no shadow.
Maya scribes kept accounts of the huge observations in codices,