"A quick question that I did not see a clear answer to in the body of the write up...did Starry Night Pro validate the assumed origination date range of the cloak, or invalidate said?"Andis Kaulins replied:
That's a very good question. As you have deftly observed, I have avoided the date corroboration issue almost entirely, and this intentionally so, because I simply can not tell definitively from the small photos available exactly where the rather heavy-handed slits in the cloak start and end and where the lines should be precisely drawn, because the cloak is also damaged around those slits, so that the threshold method does not work there.
Nevertheless, I was not happy with my initial result, so that I have recalculated the entire thing by placing several layers of thresholded pictures on top of one another to give a composite photograph - which allows a more accurate placing of the lines, and give the new results below. Theoretically, the angle between the vertical celestial meridian running between Scorpio and Orion and the dagger mark on the upper left edge of the cloak (presumably the Autumn Equinox) gives an angular separation by Starry Night Pro of about 30°, which would in fact correspond to around 300 BC, the date to which the Gerum Cloak is dated.
As for the Spring Equinox (the right lower corner of the Gerum Cloak), this is a troublesome cloak region for interpretation. I previously calculated it as 24°, measured from Orion's bow viz. shield, which gave me a date of ca. 1750 BC, so that I was concerned about that date. In the recalculation above we have 15°, measured from Bellatrix, i.e. the right edge of Orion, which would measure to Aldebaran and the Hyades, whereas 30° would measure to the Pleiades and it is about 50° angular separation to the Spring Equinox in 300 BC. This corner of the decipherment I think one can best view as "unclear" and I have marked it so in the revised decipherment above. Perhaps in fact they were marking Aldebaran and the Hyades and the Pleiades in that era, but I am sceptical.
The first thing that must be done - based on the results of my work - is for the Gerum Cloak to be examined in Sweden by the forensics experts there to confirm or deny whether stars of the heavens are marked on that Gerum Cloak, as I allege they are.
The next thing to be done by the forensic experts in Sweden is to mark exactly the contours of the dagger incisions (i.e. the slits in the cloak made by some kind of a sharp object) and then to draw the various possible lines which can be drawn to and from these various slits (both from the back as well as the front of the slits) across the cloak to see what kinds of exact angle measurements one obtains.
Only then would one be in a position to determine exactly where the lines were originally intended to run and then one could measure the resulting angles exactly, thereby permitting a more exact interpretation.
Even then, we have no assurance that the astronomy depicted on the cloak necessarily coincides with the era in which the cloak was made. The cloak could be a copy of an earlier cloak. (We have this problem, for example, with chronologies found on cuneiform tablets - which in part have simply been copied from much earlier predecessors - see my discussion of MUL.APIN ).
I think that my discovery of star representations on the Gerum Cloak can be reproduced and substantiated. I think it is less clear as to how possible lines of astronomical orientation on the cloak may ultimately be interpreted.
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