Tarakka: Ancient Monuments of Bhubaneswar as Reflections of Stars
By Deepak Bhattacharya 1 & P. C. Naik 2
Edited by Sharif Sakr
Experiment One - Map Superimposition
The standard Survey of India tourist map for Bhubaneswar [3] has some of the monuments marked on it. The authors marked other monuments, with reference to a standard INTACH map, giving a total of 28 marked monuments. Each monument was given a number code between 1 and 28, as in Fig 1 above. The zone in which all the monuments lay covered only the lower half of the map, and this section was scanned and reproduced at 1/3 scale [4]. All marked monuments were radially connected with straight lines to the Parasurameswar temple, to produce a starry pattern with the Parasurameswar temple at the centre. We call this starry pattern Tarakka. The terrestrial Tarakka was then compared with star map, centred over the star Betelgeuse (α Orionis), which is known as Rudra, the "red hot star", in Siddhanta astronomy. Where the angles roughly matched up, the corresponding stars were given the appropriate number code, to pair them with the matching terrestrial monuments. The reasons for using this method of comparison are explained below.
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| Fig. 2 - Survey of India with Terrestrial Tarakka |
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| Fig. 3 - Star positions in the night sky, based on bi-polar zenithal view standard star map (Ref. 13). |
Footnotes:
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