Oldest known star map found hidden in sacred text

A mediæval parchment from a monastery in Egypt has yielded a surprising treasure. Hidden beneath a religious text, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — thought to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky. Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. The extract illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them.