Related papers: Cometary records revise Eastern Mediterranean chro…

The blinding of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VI in Constantinople in August 797 and his overthrow by his mother Eirene, who then until 802 ruled as first female emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, was used as legitimation for the…

Extending the investigation of the presumed primordial comet as part of continuing work on a new model of the Kreutz sungrazer system, I confront a previously derived set of orbital elements with Aristotle's remarks in his Meteorologica to…

This paper discusses a recently proposed scenario of a climate-induced Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean in the 11th century AD. It demonstrates that such a scenario cannot be maintained when confronted with proxy data from various…

Coins of Armenian king Tigranes II the Great (95-55 BC), silver and copper-bronze tetradrachms and drachms, clearly reveal a star with a tail on the royal tiara which may be associated with the Halley's comet passage of 87 BC. If so, one…

The beginning of the calendar record inscribed on the Mamari tablet has been dated to the day of the summer solstice of December 20, 1680 A.D. The moon was not visible earlier at night. Because of a possible solar eclipse it was a perilous…

Auroral records found in historical archives and cosmogenic isotopes found in natural archives have served as sound proxies of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and solar energetic particles (SEPs), respectively, for dates prior to the onset of…

There is a good cause to assert that the Easter Islanders constantly watched Aldebaran and the Pleiades in the past. The Russian scholar Irina K. Fedorova and the American scholar Georgia Lee were the first who contributed significantly to…

We analyze eight epochs of Hubble Space Telescope H$\alpha$+[N II] imaging of Eta Carinae's outer ejecta. Proper motions of nearly 800 knots reveal that the detected ejecta are divided into three apparent age groups, dating to around 1250…

We outline the priority of high quality data of astronomical content as our strategy for the analysis of the ancient astronomical records in the search of the absolute chronology of the Near East in II millennium BC. The correspondingly…

We investigate possible reasons for the absence of historical records of the supernova of 1054 in Europe. At the same time, we search for the new evidences as well. We establish that the previously acclaimed 'Arabic' records from ibn Butlan…

We present the results of our orbital computations in support of the recently proposed contact-binary model for the Kreutz sungrazer system (Sekanina 2021, 2022). We demonstrate that comet Ikeya-Seki (C/1965 S1) previously passed perihelion…

The ancient priest-astronomers constantly watched many heavenly bodies. The record about Halley's Comet of 1682 A.D. has been decoded completely. Good agreement between it and the results of European astronomers is seen. The records about…

This article advances the hypothesis that the heightened eschatological sensitivity evident among the historians writing in the 5th century and its weaker echos in the time of Charlemagne were caused by the irregularities of the the…

A re-investigation of the parapegma of Euktemon (5th century BC, Athens), based on the assumption that some star observations may in fact have been calculated rather than directly observed. The calculation follows Pliny, Natural History…

In a previous work, we establish that the acclaimed 'Arabic' records of SN 1054 from ibn Butlan originate from Europe. Also, we reconstructed the European sky at the time of the event and find that the 'new star' (SN 1054) was in the west…

The traditional date of 1595 BCE for the destruction of Babylon by the Hittite king Mursili I is accepted by most historians for many years despite notable controversies. This pivotal date is considered crucial to the various calculations…

We re-examine the long-standing problem of the date of the Cassiopeia A supernova (SN), in view of recent claims that it might be the 1630 "noon-star" seen at the birth of King Charles II. We do not support this identification, based on the…

This paper describes progress achieved in early investigations of the orbital motion and light curve of comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS), the third ground-based discovery of a Kreutz sungrazer in the 21st century. The highly unusual trait of the…

It is noted that effective very recently, the orbital motion of Encke's comet has become affected by a very slight nongravitational deceleration. Soon after J. F. Encke established in the early 19th century that the comet was returning to…

People have probably been watching the sky since the beginning of human history. Observers in pre-telescopic ages recorded anomalous events and these astronomical records in the historical documents provide uniquely valuable information for…