We must also remember that no astronomical observer has ever witnessed or lived through one entire precession cycle. Therefore the cycle employed by scientists is not an observed fact; rather it is the product of calculations derived from data of varying degree of accuracy. Even the actual path of Earth’s celestial pole in the sky is not truly known. The historical information remains vague. We have patched together the rare, surviving texts and monuments of antiquity with the short period of modern observational data to envision the bigger picture of the whole cycle.

As early as 1873, the prevailing theory of precession was challenged. Alfred Wilks Drayson made a critical astronomical discovery* and demonstrated that Earth's celestial pole describes a path round a point distant six degrees from the pole of the ecliptic in a period of roughly 32,000 years.

* [Some of Drayson’s findings were also publicized in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association in 1922 - about twenty years after his death.]

Drayson analyzed records of star positions, and recognized the probability that there have been pronounced variations in the obliquity of the ecliptic over large time frames. Though he refrained from offering a plausible explanation for the cause of the unusual pole movement, he was the first scientist to point out that empirical science made a huge blunder in proposing the model of a wobbling Earth orbiting a stationary Sun.

Let's not forget that all ideas about the motion of the sphere of the fixed stars were born before the recent technological advances, which produced better telescopes and much more accurate clocks.

Yet regardless of such technological means, it appears that the cognitive ability of the ancient thinkers and seers may have been much broader than ours and perhaps they realized the bigger picture a lot clearer than we do.

From the fragments of ancient monuments and records that still exist, we have learned that most of the ancient cultures were not only awestruck by the stars and revered them as something sacred, but some of them also used the stars in a practical scientific sense – namely as a marker for time.

The prime example, of course, is the ancient Egyptian civilization, who regarded the star Sirius as the central object for their calendar system. These ancient astronomers noticed that the yearly motion of Sirius in the sky appears to be in tune with the solar year - the year of the seasons.

In science this phenomenon was first discovered by the astronomer Tycho Brahe – who was Kepler’s teacher - and modern observations clearly confirm his findings and thus the ancient observations.

For instance, Jed Buchwald – a distinguished Professor of History & Science - made it very clear that during most of Egyptian history "Sirius remains about the same distance from the equinoxes - and so from the solstices - throughout these many centuries, despite precession".

And the Meridian Transit Measurements of Sirius, that Karl-Heinz Homann began to record almost two decades ago, offer even more conclusive proof – but more on that a little later.

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