I was trying to reconcile the north facing azimuths of two tower tombs in North Africa at round 148-112 BC, with the angles shown on star charts which illustrate the precession of the earth and its axial pole.
I`m unsure of what I found and I was hoping that an astroarchaeologist might be able to explain it it me, but I found that degrees from the celestial pole (to the point of observation on earth) - the difference in degrees between the azimuth (at the point of observation on earth) and the bearing on the star chart = the latitude at the point of observation on earth.
I`m not sure if this is useful or just a mathematical coincidence of little worth. Maths really isn`t my forte, and I suspect what seems like something inexplicable to me would very much be "bread and butter" to an expert! I`d much appreciate any help with this - I know, I should have spent less time loking out of the window in period two!
TIA.
Dear Michael Collins, place both objects to Google Earth, find the azimuth/s. If tower oriented to North Pole, it is the result. If not, try to find another approach. There are more important things than astroarchaeology...
Thank-you for your response, and I`m sorry it`s taken me almost a week to reply. I agree that there are more imortant things in this world, but my curiousity had peaked with this occurence. It is not an alignment with the celestial pole that interests me, it is the monuments alignments with the stars, Polaris and Kochab. My interest is in history of the Second Punic War; the tower tombs at el Khroub and Thugga were just a slight digression of mine in order to establish the importance of the orientations of monuments in ancient Numidian architecture as a whole. I know the present day stellar orientations of the structures, it is their historical, stellar orientations that interests me. These historical orientations and alignments with other physical and man-made features made them meaningful to their builders and patrons.
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