Hipparchus’s sky catalog found
A famous statue carries the only surviving record of a star catalog lost for 2,000 years.The ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes, invented the stellar magnitude scale, discovered a nova, and made accurate planetary observations. He also compiled the world’s first star catalog, in 129 b.c. But the catalog vanished in antiquity, and Hipparchus’s only surviving work is his Commentary on the Phaenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus, which describes the celestial constellation figures in detail. (continue reading)