Heavens above
A 600-year-old astronomical document is now moving into the modern era, with a symposium at the Whipple Museum tomorrow (Wednesday 28 May) to mark its digitisation. As I opened it, the shock was considerable. The instrument pictured there was quite unlike an astrolabe - or anything else immediately recognisable - Derek de Solla Price Scholars still do not know how the document came to be deposited in the Perne Library at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in the 15th century, but the astronomical instrument it describes has been brought to life by successive Cambridge academics, and now turned into a fully operational digital model. In the 1950s, a PhD student at Christ's College, Derek de Solla Price, came across a book, dated 1393, which he named the 'Equatorie of the Planetis'. The manuscript was believed to be just another medieval discussion of astrolabes, instruments that had been widely used since antiquity to observe the positions of the stars. "It was a rather dull volume, traditionally attributed to an obscure astronomer, and it had probably hardly been opened in the last five hundred years," Price later wrote. "As I opened it, the shock was considerable.
