[X] My Assistant

[Guest_Oersted_*]

Sorry, wanted to put this in the Front Page Stories-forum, but wasn't allowed to post there, so where do I put it?

Anyway:

Woohoo, my picture was accepted for Astronomy Picture of the Day!
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070420.html

It's on tomorrow, April 20th, but you can preview it on my web page, http://www.dalsgaard.eu/Pantheon/index.html

The Pantheon is my favourite building in the whole world, so that makes it even sweeter to get this photo accepted. Amazing fact: The dome is a perfect half-sphere, and if it was continued as a complete sphere, it would just touch the floor of the building. And oh yes: the Pantheon was built in the 2nd century a.D. - Impressive to say the least...

[ngunn]

A great picture of a great subject! I hope lot's of people appreciate it. The Pantheon is a building I would dearly love to see. Nearly 1900 years old and still the largest masonry dome in the world - amazing. The idea of the view through the lantern as representing the Earth within the heavens is brilliant. It makes you wonder just how 'modern' the architect's thinking might have been.

[Guest_Oersted_*]

The idea of the view through the lantern as representing the Earth within the heavens is brilliant. It makes you wonder just how 'modern' the architect's thinking might have been.

You put the thoughts I have into words much better than I could have done.

I'm sure the builders had some ideas, when they capped the dome with an empty space. Surely it wasn't just done with no thought behind it. And surely it wasn't just an empty space to them.

But what they were thinking is difficult to know, I guess. Did they really make a heliocentric world image, with the sun in the middle, illuminating the rest of the world? Or did they think of the center as the Earth? - I'm not quite sure I believe that one. Don't think we have any historical representations of the Earth as a blue ball in space before Apollo8.

Or was there a more prosaic reason behind the opening? I'm thinking that since it was a Pantheon, maybe they just had the opening so that incense smoke and smoke from offerings would waft out at the top? (I don't know if anybody ever studied the Pantheon's properties as a chimney!).

Oculus means eye, maybe the opening was thought of as a viewpoint.

Or maybe it was a gate? Smoke rising out of it, from animals whose intestines had served for auguries. Or cremated people, going to the Heavens?

Just rambling here...