Ancient Astronomy

Good morning and welcome to Ancient Astronomy with Sarah.

So today we're gonna be talking about astronomy and how ancient civilizations in

Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece use astronomy to influence their daily lives.

So first we're gonna define what astronomy is.

So astronomy is the study of celestial beings in

space or the study of things in space.

Today, scientists use this field to study other planets, stars,

solar systems and Galaxies,

even though they're so far away,

they can tell us so much about the very planet we stand on and

can explain very complex questions that we

can't understand by just looking at earth,

ancient astronomers thought of this too and began to track

the stars and other celestial objects just like scientists do today

to answer questions. They had just like us.

So what was ancient astronomy?

Ancient astronomy tracked the movement of objects

in the heavens similar to us because

they thought of the space as heavens because they didn't

know that we could travel beyond earth.

So who was it used by

ancient astronomy was used by astronomers like a

circus

and other famous astronomers.

Um But it was also used by a lot of famous rulers like Romulus, Nili

and Julius Caesar.

Why was it used?

So ancient astronomy was used for navigation, storytelling and timekeeping.

We have to remember that

a lot of their gods and religion was told through oral

uh telling

and

their

gods were seen as in the heavens or in the sky a lot of times in constellations.

So they use the constellations to tell the stories of their gods

and they used stars to navigate and travel

and they also used planets, stars and other celestial objects to keep time,

what we'll be talking about

in this podcast.

So now we're gonna need to go back in time to see

why exactly did they need to track time?

So some of the main reasons were harvesting, they needed to track time to

know the different seasons.

So they would know when to harvest, when to plant things. They would need to know

animal migration patterns for hunting so that they wouldn't

be too late after animals had already migrated.

They would need to know

different times for wars because they wouldn't want to show up a month later.

And a lot of

ancient Romans were very religious and so they needed to

know the specific days for certain festivals or their holidays.

Um There were also many different types of

ways to track time such as sun dials, armillary spheres

and uh mechanisms and Caesar's calendar and the Gregorian calendar,

which came from Caesar's calendar.

We're talking about.

So these were the different time tracking devices.

One was the sun dial, this was one of the very first types of tracking time.

And it was very simple.

It was just a huge circle on the ground with different markings on it.

And there would be a

either a pillar in the middle or kind of a triangle looking thing.

So when the sun was in different positions in the sky,

it would hit the pillar or the triangle and cast a shadow,

which would tell people at different times.

And we've talked about this a good amount in class

and how the shadows would change throughout the year.

And astronomers actually noticed this as well, which led them to notice that

we might not be the center of the universe and some

still thought that we were the center of the universe.

Um But this gave them a lot of information about where we were

and also told them a lot about the

different solstices like winter solstice and summer solstice.

This was an artifact found near a

theater in ancient Rome and

it had ancient writings on it

and

it was uncovered and it was in very good condition.

And a lot of scientists today were able to find a lot of good information about it and

how they were used. And these things were humongous because the bigger the

sun dials were, the more accurately we could judge the time.

Next was the artillery sphere.

These were very ahead of their time and they're crazy accurate for

um tracking the

moon's patterns, the lunar patterns, the solar patterns

and seeing where different planets were at different times.

And they were crazy accurate.

And the next is this, which I do not know how to pronounce

um

which was,

yeah, and this was, it,

it was very similar to a computer which is

also extremely ahead of its time and very crazy because

it was from around

2000 years ago, over 2000 years ago.

And the image on the left was an artifact actually that was found in the ocean.

So it was actually very well preserved for sitting in the ocean for over 2000 years.

And the image on the right is something that it would be similar to.

And this object was basically

like a computer. It had different um mechanisms in it

and a lot of different

rain, celestial movements

in sky.

Next, we have the

Caesars calendar,

which was one of the

first kind of accurate

long amount of time tracking calendars.

So the other four images that we just looked at

were primarily used for short tracking time and either tracking the stars and

seeing like this, for example,

is tracking short periods of time and these are tracking

um celestial movements, power calendars as we know today are for tracking

weeks, days, months, years and for

are happening throughout time.

Now, these

um this one is a little harder to read because it isn't black and white previously.

And they were made a while ago, they

certain dates would be written in red to signify whether it's

the first day of the month or if it's a holiday festive

or if it was the middle of the month or just certain days,

because certain days had different meetings.

And then finally we get the Gregorian calendar, which was created by the Pope.

Um and this calendar

signified

uh is a lot more accurate and because

they really needed to show their specific Christian holidays

and then that later became the calendar that we have today.

And now I can go back and here are my

sources.

Um Thank you for listening.

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