f68r: eclipse from 1419?

[Linda]

Hi Matheus, 

Your images didn't work as they were display pages, so I put in the images and left behind the imgur links by taking the [img][/img] off them as I went through your post. 

Hello everyone,

I'm Matheus, a Voynich enthusiast. I am not an expert nor a researcher. Therefore, I don't know if this is a well-known fact, if someone has already made this hipothesis, or if I'm the first. I didn't find anyone talking about the same thing, so I decided to post it here for more experienced people to analyse.

I was looking at some old posts in Stephen Bax's blog and found one that really caught my attention, about the eclipse in folio 68r. Andrés Eloy Martínez Rojas argued at that time that it might relate to an eclipse in april 15, 1409.

While looking at the folio, it's pretty noticeable that there's a line drawn from the sun to a group of seven stars. Andrés argues that it's the Pleiades, but this just didn't make sense to me: why would the Pleiades have a line like this?

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This made me start a search for more reasonable guesses. After some days, I was able to identify something that caught my eye:

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This is a possible view of an eclipse that happened on march 26, 1419. Notice that the Pisces constellation is oriented in a way that (in my view) matches exactly the drawing, even the curve drawn in the manuscript is extremely similar to the "tail" of the Pisces. Also notice that the manuscript has seven stars drawn, and that the Pisces "head" also has seven stars.

"But Matheus, where was the eclipse visible from? If it were only from the Americas, for example, this is useless!"

Yes, and that's the most interesting part (in my opinion): the eclipse could be seen from pretty much anywhere in not only Europe, but many parts of Africa and Asia too at that time:

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If we were to get a glimpse of what the sky looked like specifically on northern Italy (given the handwriting, castle, etc.), it would be something like this:

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If we disable the atmosphere features:

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And if the orient the Pisces constellation to the manuscript's orientation (almost a 180º turn):

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From this, we could draw some questions and hypothesis:

1. Which star is the one next to the (suposedly) Pisces constellation in the manuscript? My guess: it could be Uranus, Diphda or Fomalhaut. It matches the orientation.
2. Which stars are the two at the top right? My guess: Venus and Jupiter OR Mars and Aldebaran. They also match the orientation.
3. Which stars are the three at the bottom right? My guess: Schedar, Caph and Navi OR the three from the Camelopardalis constellation. Best fitting, the orientation is a bit messed up.
4. Which stars are the four at the bottom left? My guess: Algenib, Alpheratz, Markab and Scheat? These were the most fitting ones I was able to find.
5. Why would someone be drawing the eclipse? My guess: some kind of divination or mere description of the occured. If we take a look at the other parts of the folio:

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It looks like (at least to me) that there's a pretty solid order: we see the sun and the moon (is it the sun and the moon?) approaching and kinda switching phases, and this could be the author(s) saying something like "This happened, and right after we got an eclipse!" or something similar.

Something though caught my eye: there's a star that almost repeats it's name in the full folio:

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f68r3: "dcholday"

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f68r2: "dcheoldy"

Could they be the same star in different "states"? I don't know, but the word is almost the same. One could argue that the (possible) "root" is different (ol for one, eol for the other) but I don't know, maybe the root is just "old" or "ol" and "dch" and "dche" mean some kind of "state" of the star? Just speculation. If we get the sky everyday before the eclipse:

(My Stellarium is in Portuguese, so be aware that "sol" = sun and "lua" = moon)

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March 25

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March 24

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March 23

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March 22

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March 21

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March 20

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March 19

Considering the position, the similarity of the words and my hypothesis on which "star" that one next to the (alleged) Pisces represents, I think that dcholday/dcheoldy is in some form a label for "Uranus" or different states of the planet.

Another thing I wanted to point out is the progression in the manuscript moon phases:

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One thing I noticed is that the moon goes new (at least it's what it appears to me). Indeed, in march 26 1419, the moon went new:

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According to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

So maybe what's written around the moon is something talking about this? Like "last quarter" and "new" for each one? I don't know, it's an hypothesis.

This is all, let me know what you think! I'm 100% NOT professional in this field, so I don't know if there are serious flaws here. Thank you!!