THE ASTRONOMY OF THE ODYSSEY
The John D. Mackay Memorial Lecture
It’s one of the greatest sea stories of all time, composed over 2,800 years ago, and now a film – Odysseus’s ten-year journey home after the fall of Troy. He must cope with the great whirlpool Charybdis and the one-eyed giant Polyphemus; with the crew lured towards the rocks by the Sirens’ song, and with the crew too opening the bag of winds and releasing their full catastrophic fury.
There are also wonderful islands of refuge, with the enchantress Circe and the nymph Calypso, where a hero could be tempted to stay. But somehow he finds his way out of each situation and reaches his home of Ithaca, where his old dog is the first to recognise him.
It has everything that a filmmaker of today could wish for – and beyond the myths of gods and monsters, says Dr Vassilios Spathopoulos, Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, the story contains something far more practical: a remarkably precise record of the ancient Greek sky. Join him as he decodes the hidden astronomical information in Homer’s epic tale – “including the constellations that guided Odysseus across open seas, the dog star that brought fever and dread, and a solar eclipse that may let us date the fall of Troy to the exact day.”
Supported by the Institute of Physics in Scotland
“… and taking his seat artfully with the steering oar he held her on her course, nor did sleep ever descend on his eyelids as he kept his eye on the Pleiades and late-setting Boötes, and the Bear, to whom men give also the name of the Wagon, who turns about in a fixed place and looks at Orion, and she alone is never plunged in the wash of the Ocean. For so Calypso, bright among goddesses, has told him to make his way over the sea, keeping the Bear on his left hand …”
