Digital Skies for Ancient Contexts

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 8th May 2025 (19:45 - 22:00)

Venue: Meeting Room

Ever wondered how the ancient Egyptians studied the stars?
Dr. J. Luna Zagorac is using, Python and digital tools of the modern age, to unlock the secrets of the Ramesside Star Clocks, ancient star charts found in tombs in the Valley of the Kings. 

These star clocks, arranged in a 12x7 grid, may have helped Egyptians track the night sky over 3,000 years ago. To figure out how they worked, Dr. Zagorac created decanOpy, a Python-based tool that maps the motion of stars. By combining this with software like Stellarium, she’s digitally recreating the Egyptian sky from around 1300 BCE. 

The goal? To compare ancient records with modern astronomy and figure out which stars the Egyptians were actually observing. This research is helping us connect ancient star names to their modern equivalents and understand how early civilizations viewed the cosmos. 

A perfect blend of history, astronomy, and coding—bringing the past to life with modern technology!

Join the meeting online HERE if you are unable to attend in person

Speaker: Luna Zagorac

I'm a cosmologist through and through: passionate not just about what our silly little Universe is up to, but also about all the ways we as humans interact with it and understand it. I love to work in radically interdisciplinary ways, from marrying quantum-inspired techniques and numerical simulations of axion-like dark matter to developing a Python package to map ancient Egyptian star data from hieroglyphs to virtual skies. I'm always keen to share my work and interests through scicomm and teaching, so if you need a speaker, a podcast guest, a Ms. Frizzle, or just want to know why WIMPs are like horses and modified gravity is like zebras, feel free to reach out through my website!

For a mostly up-to-date publication list, please see my website or Google Scholar page.

Learn more about Luna Zagorac