Talk:Satabhisa

The identification with lambda Aqr with Śatabhiṣa can be traced to the early works of Colebrook, Bentley, Whitney and Burgess, corroborated by Indian authors who were well versed with Siddhanta and European astronomy; they include Keropant, Bapudeva Sastry, V B Ketkar and S B Dikshit (all scholars of 19th century). We checked the coordinates from the catalogue of Nityananda (15th century) and they match. There are no star maps with the names written down. The only chart that is available in Jaipur collection was prepared by Madho Singh (son of Sawai Jai Singh, who built the famous masonry instruments). It is a chart (T006, online catalogue of Sarma, 2023) for identifying the time of meridian transits of stars. The red pointers give the transit time; the black ones provide rise and times. From the chart we can read 56:32 ghaṭi for Śatabhiṣa. We need to understand this in the Indian system, which has a day is divided into 60 ghaṭi. On this scale for example, the meridian transit of Antares (Jyeṣṭha) occurs at 40:34 as per the Table. The difference 15:58 ghaṭi gets converted to 6hours:23 minutes. (With 1 ghaṭi = 24 minutes) This is exactly the difference in their Right Ascensions, 22:52 - 16:29 = 6:23 (from stellarium)