The Maya were quite accomplished astronomers. Their primary interest, in contrast to "western" astronomers, were Zenial Passages when the Sun crossed over the Maya latitudes. On an annual basis the sun travels to its summer solstice point, or the latitude of 23-1/3 degrees north.
Most of the Maya cities were located south of this latitude, meaning that they could observe the sun directly overhead during the time that the sun was passing over their latitude. This happened twice a year, evenly spaced around the day of solstice.
The Maya could easily determine these dates, because at local noon, they cast no shadow. Zenial passage observations are possible only in the Tropics and were quite unknown to the Spanish conquistadors who descended upon the Yucatan peninsula in the 16th century. The Maya had a god to represented this position of the Sun called the Diving God.
The Maya believed the Earth was flat with four corners. Each corner represented a cardinal direction. Each direction had a color: east-red; north-white; west-black; south-yellow. Green was the center.
At each corner, there was a jaguar of a different color that supported the sky. The jaguars were called bacabs.
Mayans believed the universe was divided into thirteen layers, each with its own god.
Mayans believed that four jaguars, called bacabs, held up the sky. Each had a different color.
The Milky Way itself was much venerated by the Maya. They called it the World Tree, which was represented by a tall and majestic flowering tree, the Ceiba. The Milky Way was also called the Wakah Chan. Wak means "Six" or "Erect". Chan or K'an means "Four", "Serpent" or "Sky". The World Tree was erect when Sagittarius was well over the horizon. At this time the Milky Way rose up from the horizon and climbed overhead into the North. The star clouds that form the Milky Way were seen as the tree of life where all life came from.
Near Sagittarius, the center of our galaxy, where the World Tree meets the Ecliptic was given special attention by the Maya. A major element of the World Tree include the Kawak Monster, a giant head with a kin in its forehead.
This monster was also a mountain or witz monster. A sacrificial bowl on its head contains a flint blade representing sacrifice, and the Kimi glyph that represents death. The Ecliptic is sometimes represented as a bar crossing the major axis of the world tree, making a form that is similar to the Christian Cross. On top of the World Tree we find a bird that has been called, the Principal Bird deity, or Itzam Ye. There is also evidence that shows the Sun on the World Tree as it appeared to the Maya at Winter Solstice.
During the months of winter, when the so-called "Winter" Milky Way dominates the sky, it was called the "White Boned Serpent." This part of the Milky Way passed overhead at night during the dry season. It is not brilliant like the star clouds that dominate the sky North of the equator during the months of Summer, but observers at dark locations will easily see the glow. Here the Ecliptic crosses the Milky Way again, near the constellation of Gemini which was the approximate location of the Sun during Summer Solstice. It is possible that the jaws of the White-Boned Serpent were represented by the Kawak monster head.
The Maya portrayed the Ecliptic in their artwork as a Double-Headed Serpent. The ecliptic is the path of the sun in the sky which is marked by the constellations of fixed stars. Here the moon and the planets can be found because they are bound, like the Earth, to the sun.
The constellations on the ecliptic are also called the zodiac. We don't know exactly how fixed constellations on the ecliptic were seen by the Maya, but we have some idea of the order in some parts of the sky. We know there is a scorpion, which we equate with our own constellation of Scorpius, in this figure I believe they used the claws of Libra.
It has also been found that Gemini appeared to the Maya as a pig or peccary, (a nocturnal animal in the pig family.) Some other constellations on the ecliptic are identified as a jaguar, at least one serpent, a bat, a turtle, a xoc monster--that is, shark, or a sea monster.
The Pleiades were seen as the tail of the rattlesnake and is called, "Tz'ab."
April 5, 2000 - FOX News
Approximately one millennium before Archbishop Usher of Armagh concluded that creation occurred at 4004 B.C., the Mayans had calculated the cosmos was 90 million years old.
Like other pre-Columbian civilizations, the Maya had a profound knowledge of the sky. Their priests recorded astronomical observations and passed them down from generation to generation.
The result was an extremely accurate calendar that predicted the coming of eclipses and the revolutions of Venus to an error of one day in 6,000 years.
Only a handful of the parchments that chronicle this knowledge survived the zealous bonfires of the missionaries; those that did are now called codices. In one, for example, Venus is represented as a figure with two masks, symbolizing its appearance in the early morning and evening.
The calendar itself was divided into cycles 3 million years long, subdivided into units of 20 years, 400, 8,000 and 158,000 years. There were also subunits for marking the death and rebirth of the sun and fire. Rituals punctuated the cycles and acted like the needles of a clock, marking the passage of time.
It is difficult to talk of Mayan astronomy itself because it was truly part of a greater discipline: religion. The Mayan ball game is the perfect embodiment of this fact. Transmitted from previous local civilizations as far back as 3,000 B.C., it consisted in using hips, legs and the head to get a ball across a line or through a hoop.
Different symbols are brought together in the ball game. Archaeologists think the ball symbolized the sun and the game re-enacted its apparent orbit around the Earth. The sun was worshipped as a god and by playing the game, one became somewhat akin to the Sun-God. But the game might also have signaled a changing season, so that it served a purpose as well. Since agrarian societies require a timekeeper to regulate agricultural tasks, these rituals were vital to the Mayan society's survival.
Pre-Columbian ball courts and other buildings functioned both as religious temples and observatories. The architecture was used to define orientations and mark the passage of time. When Orion appeared through a designated hole or the sun shone directly on a specific spot, it meant spring was near. The pyramid of El Taj�n in Mexico, for example, is made up of 365 niches, one for each day of the year. A niche here is the equivalent of a box in one of our calendars.
Smaller calendars were sculpted into stone and gold. It is no wonder then that artists were highly regarded and given special status in Mayan society. Without artists there would be no calendars, no way to tell time, bad crops and eventually famine. For the Maya, astronomy was enmeshed into one thick fabric with art, agriculture and religion.
The advanced Mayan culture developed thanks to a complex synthesis of different culture streams arising from the home agricultural base, influenced by cultural values coming from regions lying out of the territory of Mayan settlement. Its forming falls to the so-called early phase of the initial period placed between 1500 � 800 BC. It was spread step-by-step to the regions of Guatemala, south-eastern Mexico, Belize, Salvador and north-western Honduras. The construction of beautiful and splendid cathedral cities, fine arts of sculpture and painting, use of their own hieroglyphic script, success in astronomy, existence of the literature and the development of handicraft and trade were the outer expression of this cultural-economic rise.
The results of Mayan observations and calculations of astronomical phenomena are concentrated in the Dresden Codex. It is a band of paper 3.5 meter long set up into 39 sheets making up 78 pages 8.5 x 20.5 cm. The paper was obtained from the bark of wild-growing species of fig tree. It is supposed that it originates from Yucatan as a latter transcription of an elder original. It contains calendrical data, written in the Mayan dating system, concerning astronomical data and the sky mechanics, and tables of multiple integers that are to be used for calculations of planetary movement ephemerids and tropical years, next to the hieroglyphic texts and numerous depicturings of the Mayan gods and ritual scenes.
The data contained in the Dresden Codex were studied by many researchers who suspected they contain astronomical data. M.Meinshausen (1913), C.E.Guthe (1921) and H.Spinden (1930) were the first who had been interested in the eclipses tables. E.Foerstemann has drawn our attention to Venus visibility ephemerides tables; he also issued the Dresden Codex with a commentary in 1892. The analysis of these ephemerides has been made by J.E.Teeple (1926). R.W.Wilson believed that some of the data could concern the observations of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (1924). The above-mentioned researchers, and lots of others, worked with the calculation coefficients of 584,283 or 584,285 days accordingly to Goodman-Martinez-Thompson when converting the Mayan dates into the Christian dating system, or tried to calculate their own coefficient. For this reason their conclusions were very diverse.
One of the most important problems during the studies of various Mayan culture phenomena had been the problem of correlating the Mayan to our Christian dating system. In present times we are used to correlate the Mayan dates with the Christian ones using the Goodman-Mart�nez-Thompson correlation. Accordingly to it, a stable coefficient of 584,283 or 584,285 days is added to the Mayan dates expressing the counts of days which have passed from a particular day to the date of a certain event. The Mayan date is converted into a Julian day number and the latter finally to the corresponding day, month and year of the Julian calendar used in modern astronomy.
Working with the Mayan data of the Dresden Codex we found that the Goodman-Mart�nez-Thompson correlation is unusable, even for the dates evidently concerning certain astronomical phenomena, such as the observations of Venus visibility, or Sun and Moon eclipses. We have obtained a new coefficient of 622,261 days for the conversion of the Mayan dates to our dating system by a complete analysis of the mutual relations between the time intervals of all the Mayan dates in the Dresden Codex and 400 inscriptions from the cathedral cities. Using the so called B�hm correlation coefficient we were successful in proving that all data contained in the Dresden Codex are concerning astronomical phenomena.
The Mayan astronomical observations were carried out by simple measuring methods. It is therefore necessary to examine them statistically while respecting unavoidable accuracy scatter. It applies first of all to the sky phenomena calculated to the past and the future during several centuries recorded in the Dresden Codex. The dated astronomical observations are concerning following:
1.The observations of Venus visibility, when it had appeared for the first time after its conjunction with the Sun as a morning star in the sky shortly before the sunrise, or after its upper conjunction, when it had appeared in the sky as an evening star shortly after the sunset.
2.The observations of Mercury visibility. Its trajectory creates an eccentric ellipse. Thanks to this eccentricity the synodic circulations of the planet lasts from 104 to 132 days. The average length of the synodic circulation is 115.877484 days.
The considerable proximity of the planet to the Sun makes its glow suppressed by dazzling sunshine.
For that reason, the Mayan astronomers could have observed it only when the planet gets to the greatest angle distance during its circulation around the Sun, so called elongation. It is the western elongation, when Mercury rises over the horizon shortly before sunrise and the eastern elongation, when it is briefly visible over the western horizon right after sunset.
The maximal angle distances are as a rule moving between 18 to 23 degrees.
The maximal elongation of 27 degrees and 49 minutes happens when this elongation visible from the Earth runs during the epihelium, that means the greatest distance between Mercury and the Sun (Mercury gets there once for its sidereal circulation on its eccentric trajectory).
The sidereal circulation is the real time of circulation of any planet around the Sun and it makes in this case 87.9693 days. During the perihelia (minimal distance from the Sun) is the maximal angle distance visible from the Earth 15 degrees and 55 minutes.
It seems as if the planet stood in one place for 4-12 days in the time of maximal elongations.
Its angle distance from the Sun changes between 1-2 degrees. This insignificant movement could not have been discovered by the Mayan observing methods.
For that reason their determination of Mercury elongations moves on average inside the borders of that "mistake".
3.The solar eclipses and the fullmoons and newmoons.
4.The observation of the heliacal risings and settings of the planets. The heliacal rise sets in after the planets� conjunction with the Sun, when they are visible in the morning sky before the sunrise. During their heliacal setting the planets are visible in the evening sky after sunset. In the period of conjunction the planets are invisible for a few days. By observing the heliacal risings and settings dates we are able to determine the length of the synodic circulations of the planets.
5.The observation of the planetary conjunctions (when two planets observable from the Earth get in line and are nearly covering each other). The Dresden Codex is mostly describing only close approaches of the planets because some of the dates are calculated to the past and to the future.
6.The determination of equinoxes and solstices.
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