Air and Space Museum & Planetarium

Traditional Astronomy from Ancient Civilizations

The Smithsonian Airspace Museum in Washington, DC, has a program called the Explainers. To be eligible for this program, you must be a high school, undergraduate, graduate, or Doctoral student. The program allows you to gain more public speaking, teaching, and storytelling experience by conversing with visitors to the museum while presenting at Discovery stations that cover a wide range of subjects on astronomy or principles of airplane flight.   

I worked with the astronomy education team to develop oral traditions for the planetarium that included diverse cultural interpretations and practical applications of ancient astronomy, such as EGYPT (Egyptians - Africa), CHINA (Taiwanese - Asia), Aztecs (Indigenous Central America - Mexicans), Mississippians (Indigenous North America - Native Americans) & Benjamin Banneker African American – (America - Baltimore Maryland). The borrowed knowledge of Astronomy, included with these oral traditions by the astronomy educators, will be incorporated into the planetarium program, conveying ECO-LORE's mission statement of oral traditions, culture & environment intersectionality.

EGYPT (Egyptians - Africa)

In ancient Egyptian culture, the calendar was centered around the star Sirus. This star is a part of the constellation—Canis Major, which looks like a dog in the sky. Sirus takes the form of the dog nose in the constellation. Canis Major could first be seen around June 21st of every year. The star was visible just before sunrise and is still one of the brightest stars in the sky. The reappearance of the star Sirus was a significant event for the Egyptians as it informed them that the Nile River was about to flood. This was a crucial time for them as the land was dry, and the rich new soil would become fertile for them to plant their yearly crops. The sighting of Sirus was vital for agricultural reasons and would inform them if they would have food for the year or face a drought and depend on their food reserves with the possibility of famine. Years of careful observation of the sky and river taught the Egyptians that the river waters would start to rise at the end of June, just after Sirus was spotted in the sky, and the flood period lasted until October, covering the land with rich black mud and preparing it for the sowing and growing period.

The harvest time started at the end of February and ended with the new Nile flood. This predictable, ongoing cycle defined the agricultural year. Researchers have found that all nine of the famous pyramids at Giza are closely aligned to true north. No one knows for certain, however, what method the Egyptians used to determine the north direction.

According to one theory, the Egyptians found the north direction by observing two stars on exact opposite sides of true north which appear to rotate around it. When they are in vertical alignment, as judged by a plumb line, their direction can be taken to be true north with a high accuracy. A plumb line is a line to which a weight is attached to determine a true vertical alignment. The stars that the Egyptians used were probably in Ursa Major and Ursa Minor the constellations known as The Great Bear and The Little Bear. Both of these were in transit in the sky before and after 2467 BC when the Pyramids were being built.