Related papers: Australian Aboriginal Astronomy: Overview
Song and dance are a traditional means of strengthening culture and passing knowledge to successive generations in the Torres Strait of northeastern Australia. Dances incorporate a range of apparatuses to enhance the performance, such as…
Cultural astronomy is an interdisciplinary area of research that studies how perceptions and concepts related to the sky are part of the worldview of a culture. One of its branches, archaeoastronomy, focuses on the material remains of past…
We present 25 accounts of comets from 40 Australian Aboriginal communities, citing both supernatural perceptions of comets and historical accounts of bright comets. Historical and ethnographic descriptions include the Great Comets of 1843,…
Australian Indigenous astronomical traditions hint at a relationship between animals in the skyworld and the behaviour patterns of their terrestrial counterparts. In our continued study of Aboriginal astronomical traditions from the Great…
Cultural Astronomy is interdisciplinary connecting the arts, humanities, social & physical sciences. Data collection methods and theories are used from many disciplines and meld with methods and theories within cultural astronomy. The…
Cultural astronomy reveals ways in which perception and culture have shaped the interpretation of the night sky.
The Kamilaroi people and their neighbours, the Euahlayi, Ngemba, and Murrawarri, are an Aboriginal cultural grouping located in the northwest and north central of New South Wales. They have a rich history, but have been missed in much of…
We show that many ancient Indian mythological legends are really allegorical depictions of astronomical and other physical phenomena of which the composers had a good idea. This detail enables us to also use techniques of astronomical…
Indigenous Knowledge is important for Indigenous communities across the globe and for the advancement of our general scientific knowledge. In particular, Indigenous astronomical knowledge integrates many aspects of Indigenous Knowledge,…
Indigenous peoples across the world observe the motions and positions of stars to develop seasonal calendars. Additionally, changing properties of stars, such as their brightness and colour, are also used for predicting weather. Combining…
Aboriginal Australians carefully observe the properties and positions of stars, including both overt and subtle changes in their brightness, for subsistence and social application. These observations are encoded in oral tradition. I examine…
Astronomers occasionally detect an object having unexpected shape, unexplainable photometry, or unprecedented spectra that are inconsistent with our contemporary knowledge of the universe. Upon careful assessment, many of these anomalies…
Whilst camped at Ooldea, South Australia, between 1919 and 1935, the amateur anthropologist Daisy Bates CBE (1859-1951) recorded the daily lives, lore, and oral traditions of the Aboriginal people of the Great Victoria Desert region…
I discuss various aspects of archeoastronomy concentrating on physical artifacts (i.e., not including ethno-archeoastronomy) focusing on the period that ended about 2000 years ago. I present examples of artifacts interpreted as showing the…
The new astronomical technique of gravitational microlensing enables measurements of high precision to be made in certain circumstances. Useful advances have been made in the fields of galactic astronomy, stellar astronomy and planetary…
The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years…
Astronomical observations were used as a marker for time and the Calendar from ancient times. A more subtle calibration of epochs is thrown up by an observation of the position of the solstices and equinoxes, because these points shift in…
Mathematics curriculums at most universities tend to perpetuate a belief that higher mathematics is historically and culturally European. First Nations and minority students may not see their identities and cultures reflected in the…
The Mayan culture collected exquisite astronomical data for over a millennium. However, it failed to come up with the breakthrough ideas of modern astronomy because the data was analyzed within a mythological culture of astrology that…
Anomalies drive scientific discovery -- they are associated with the cutting edge of the research frontier, and thus typically exploit data in the low signal-to-noise regime. In astronomy, the prevalence of systematics --- both "known…