Mattei: Other star name cribs?

["Bradley E. SCHAEFER" <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi;
	Mike Mattei proposes some star names for the VMS picture with the
possible Pleiades.  He roughly tries to identify the 2, 3, and 4 stars in
the other quadrants with asterisms in the four sky quadrants.  Tycho's
supernova was in 1572, so many of you would say that it cannot be the real
ID.
	However, with this line of thinking, there *is* a well known
asterism *on* the zodiac roughly a quarter of the way around the ecliptic
from the Pleiades.  The Waterjar in Aquarius is a famous asterism, even
though it is not made from bright stars.  The shape is perfect for the
foursome of stars in the VMS quadrant one removed from the 'Pleiades
quadrant'.  If this is taken as true, then the suggestion would be that
each VMS quadrant illustrates an asterism near the ecliptic at roughly 90
degree intervals.  This would be very much like the Royal Stars of the
ancients, while the Chinese have a similar setup.  Within this paradigm,
the pair of stars will be somewhere near Cancer.  Then, with only a small
deviation from 90 degree spacing, the pair could well be the famous Gemini
star pair of Castor and Pollux.  These are bright, famous, near the
ecliptic, and close enough to the quadrant site.  The quadrant of the trio
of stars would then be somewhere near Libra.  Libra is sometime drawn as
three stars, but more commonly as more.  So the match here is poor.
Anyway, these are possible cribs...
Cheers,
Brad
schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 00:07:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: Michael Mattei <mmattei@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Voynich manuscript

Hi Brad

I just finished your article of the Voynich mystery. I found it very
interesting, I always was interested in these mysterious documents and whish
I could decode them. But here is my view, many may already be known as you
do not give many in the article. You mention the stars on the chart on page
42 (lower left) where in one panel is Aldeberan and the Pleiades, well going
clockwise to the next panel there are two stars, next three, next four. If
you fold out the center star map, there is a photo of Cassiopeia on the
right side of the page. I agree that in the first panel is Aldeberan and the
pleiades. The next panel could be the pointer stars of the Big Dipper, next
the Summer Triangle (Deneb,Vega,Altair), next, might be the center three
stars of Cassiopeia (like in the photo on the right side of the page), with
Tyco's Super Nova? I forget the exact time of the nova, but the date of the
book may be in that time period. Anyway that's my two cents worth. As for
the other pages, well I could not guess, but there are many naked woman if
that has anything to say for them. Maybe some guy was making the rounds with
the ladies and kept a record of his travels by time of the year.

Hope to see you at the AAVSO meeting later this month.

        Mike Mattei