View Ancient, Current, and Future Night Sky on Home Computers

The sky the poet saw can be illustrated by installing any computer program that will display the night sky for any particular date. This analysis was done using The Sky, Student Edition distributed by Software Bisque, Golden, Col. (www.bisque.com) with the filters set to 6 by 6 brightness, the limit of naked eye astronomy.

Set the screen to show only the five inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the only moving stars the naked eye observers could have seen. Show the ecliptic and the Milky Way. Outline and label all constellations and run the motion at consecutive sunrises; look east.

For the scene at the well use sunset, look south. Begin the date on March, 500 CE. Set the location to Dublin, Ireland, Long. 6 deg., 15 min., Lat.50 deg., 20 min., or Copenhagen, Denmark. Long. 12 deg., 34 min.; Lat. 55 deg., 43 min, time zone  +1. .For the full extent of Lupus use Jerusalem, Israel, Long. 35 deg., 0 min., Lat. 31 deg., 45 min, time zone +3. This duplicates the night sky as the observer would have seen it from Northern Europe in the first millennium CE.