Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger Lucius Annaeus Seneca and known as Seneca, was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, and—in one work—satirist of the Silver Age of Latin literature. Seneca was born in Córdoba in Hispania, raised in Rome, where he was trained in rhetoric and philosophy, his father was Seneca the Elder, his elder brother was Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus, his nephew was the poet Lucan. In AD 41, Seneca was exiled to the island of Corsica by the emperor Claudius, but was allowed to return in 49 to become a tutor to Nero; when Nero became emperor in 54, Seneca became his advisor and, together with the praetorian prefect Sextus Afranius Burrus, provided competent government for the first five years of Nero's reign. Seneca's influence over Nero declined with time, in 64 Seneca was forced to take his own life for alleged complicity in the Pisonian conspiracy to assassinate Nero, in which he was to have been innocent, his stoic and calm suicide has become the subject of numerous paintings. As a writer Seneca is known for his philosophical works, for his plays, which are all tragedies.
His prose works include a dozen essays and one hundred and twenty-four letters dealing with moral issues. These writings constitute one of the most important bodies of primary material for ancient Stoicism; as a tragedian, he is best known for plays such as his Medea and Phaedra. Seneca's influence on generations is immense—during the Renaissance he was "a sage admired and venerated as an oracle of moral of Christian, edification. Seneca was born at Córdoba in the Roman province of Baetica in Hispania, his father was Lucius Annaeus Seneca the elder, a Spanish-born Roman knight who had gained fame as a writer and teacher of rhetoric in Rome. Seneca's mother, was from a prominent Baetician family. Seneca was the second of three brothers. Miriam Griffin says in her biography of Seneca that "the evidence for Seneca's life before his exile in 41 is so slight, the potential interest of these years, for social history as well as for biography, is so great that few writers on Seneca have resisted the temptation to eke out knowledge with imagination."
Griffin infers from the ancient sources that Seneca was born in either 8, 4, or 1 BC. She thinks he was born between 4 and 1 BC and was resident in Rome by AD 5. Seneca tells us that he was taken to Rome in the "arms" of his aunt at a young age when he was about five years old, his father resided for much of his life in the city. Seneca was taught the usual subjects of literature and rhetoric, as part of the standard education of high-born Romans. While still young he received philosophical training from Attalus the Stoic, from Sotion and Papirius Fabianus, both of whom belonged to the short-lived School of the Sextii, which combined Stoicism with Pythagoreanism. Sotion persuaded Seneca when he was a young man to become a vegetarian, which he practised for around a year before his father urged him to desist because the practice was associated with "some foreign rites". Seneca had breathing difficulties throughout his life asthma, at some point in his mid-twenties he appears to have been struck down with tuberculosis.
He was sent to Egypt to live with his aunt, whose husband Gaius Galerius had become Prefect of Egypt. She nursed him through a period of ill-health. In 31 AD he returned to Rome with his uncle dying en route in a shipwreck, his aunt's influence helped Seneca be elected quaestor, which earned him the right to sit in the Roman Senate. Seneca's early career as a senator seems to have been successful and he was praised for his oratory. Cassius Dio relates a story that Caligula was so offended by Seneca's oratorical success in the Senate that he ordered him to commit suicide. Seneca only survived because he was ill and Caligula was told that he would soon die anyway. In his writings Seneca has nothing good to say about Caligula and depicts him as a monster. Seneca explains his own survival as down to his patience and his devotion to his friends: "I wanted to avoid the impression that all I could do for loyalty was die."In 41 AD, Claudius became emperor, Seneca was accused by the new empress Messalina of adultery with Julia Livilla, sister to Caligula and Agrippina.
The affair has been doubted by some historians, since Messalina had clear political motives for getting rid of Julia Livilla and her supporters. The Senate pronounced a death sentence on Seneca, which Claudius commuted to exile, Seneca spent the next eight years on the island of Corsica. Two of Seneca's earliest surviving works date from the period of his exile—both consolations. In his Consolation to Helvia, his mother, Seneca comforts her as a bereaved mother for losing her son to exile. Seneca incidentally mentions the death of a few weeks before his exile. In life Seneca was married to a woman younger than himself, Pompeia Paulina, it has been thought that the infant son may have been from an earlier marriage, but the evidence is "tenuous". Seneca's other work of this period, his Consolation to Polybius, one of Claudius' freedmen, focused on consoling Polybius on the death of his brother, it is noted for its flattery of Claudius, Seneca expresses his hope that the emperor will recall him from exile.
In 49 AD Agrippina married her uncle Claudius, through her influence Seneca was recalled to Rome. Agrippina gained the praetorship for Seneca and ap
Ancient Greek
The Ancient Greek language includes the forms of Greek used in Ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BCE to the 6th century CE. It is roughly divided into the Archaic period, Classical period, Hellenistic period, it is succeeded by medieval Greek. Koine is regarded as a separate historical stage of its own, although in its earliest form it resembled Attic Greek and in its latest form it approaches Medieval Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects. Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians and philosophers, it has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects; the main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic and Doric, many of them with several subdivisions.
Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms used in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek used in the epic poems, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey", in poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects; the origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period, they differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek, but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not than 1120 BCE, at the time of the Dorian invasion—and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BCE.
The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians. The invasion is known to have displaced population to the Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians; the Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people—Dorians and Ionians, each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-west Greek is the strongest marked and earliest division, with non-west in subsets of Ionic-Attic and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Non-west is called East Greek. Arcadocypriot descended more from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age.
Boeotian had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect. Thessalian had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek, spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric, Southern Peloponnesus Doric, Northern Peloponnesus Doric; the Lesbian dialect was Aeolic Greek. All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, these colonies developed local characteristics under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects; the dialects outside the Ionic group are known from inscriptions, notable exceptions being: fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos, in Aeolian, the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar and other lyric poets in Doric.
After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BCE, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed based on Attic Greek, but with influence from other dialects. This dialect replaced most of the older dialects, although Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language, spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek. By about the 6th century CE, the Koine had metamorphosized into Medieval Greek. Ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language at least related to Greek, but its exact relationship is unclear because of insufficient data: a dialect of Greek; the Macedonian dialect (or l
Saturn
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius about nine times that of Earth, it has only one-eighth the average density of Earth, but with its larger volume Saturn is over 95 times more massive. Saturn is named after the Roman god of agriculture. Saturn's interior is composed of a core of iron–nickel and rock; this core is surrounded by a deep layer of metallic hydrogen, an intermediate layer of liquid hydrogen and liquid helium, a gaseous outer layer. Saturn has a pale yellow hue due to ammonia crystals in its upper atmosphere. Electrical current within the metallic hydrogen layer is thought to give rise to Saturn's planetary magnetic field, weaker than Earth's, but has a magnetic moment 580 times that of Earth due to Saturn's larger size. Saturn's magnetic field strength is around one-twentieth of Jupiter's; the outer atmosphere is bland and lacking in contrast, although long-lived features can appear.
Wind speeds on Saturn can reach 1,800 km/h, higher than on Jupiter, but not as high as those on Neptune. In January 2019, astronomers reported that a day on the planet Saturn has been determined to be 10h 33m 38s + 1m 52s− 1m 19s , based on studies of the planet's C Ring; the planet's most famous feature is its prominent ring system, composed of ice particles, with a smaller amount of rocky debris and dust. At least 62 moons are known to orbit Saturn, of which 53 are named; this does not include the hundreds of moonlets in the rings. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, the second-largest in the Solar System, is larger than the planet Mercury, although less massive, is the only moon in the Solar System to have a substantial atmosphere. Saturn is a gas giant because it is predominantly composed of helium, it lacks a definite surface. Saturn's rotation causes it to have the shape of an oblate spheroid, its equatorial and polar radii differ by 10%: 60,268 km versus 54,364 km. Jupiter and Neptune, the other giant planets in the Solar System, are oblate but to a lesser extent.
The combination of the bulge and rotation rate means that the effective surface gravity along the equator, 8.96 m/s2, is 74% that at the poles and is lower than the surface gravity of Earth. However, the equatorial escape velocity of nearly 36 km/s is much higher than that for Earth. Saturn is the only planet of the Solar System, less dense than water—about 30% less. Although Saturn's core is denser than water, the average specific density of the planet is 0.69 g/cm3 due to the atmosphere. Jupiter has 318 times Earth's mass, Saturn is 95 times Earth's mass. Together and Saturn hold 92% of the total planetary mass in the Solar System. Despite consisting of hydrogen and helium, most of Saturn's mass is not in the gas phase, because hydrogen becomes a non-ideal liquid when the density is above 0.01 g/cm3, reached at a radius containing 99.9% of Saturn's mass. The temperature and density inside Saturn all rise toward the core, which causes hydrogen to be a metal in the deeper layers. Standard planetary models suggest that the interior of Saturn is similar to that of Jupiter, having a small rocky core surrounded by hydrogen and helium with trace amounts of various volatiles.
This core is more dense. Examination of Saturn's gravitational moment, in combination with physical models of the interior, has allowed constraints to be placed on the mass of Saturn's core. In 2004, scientists estimated that the core must be 9–22 times the mass of Earth, which corresponds to a diameter of about 25,000 km; this is surrounded by a thicker liquid metallic hydrogen layer, followed by a liquid layer of helium-saturated molecular hydrogen that transitions to a gas with increasing altitude. The outermost layer consists of gas. Saturn has a hot interior, reaching 11,700 °C at its core, it radiates 2.5 times more energy into space than it receives from the Sun. Jupiter's thermal energy is generated by the Kelvin–Helmholtz mechanism of slow gravitational compression, but such a process alone may not be sufficient to explain heat production for Saturn, because it is less massive. An alternative or additional mechanism may be generation of heat through the "raining out" of droplets of helium deep in Saturn's interior.
As the droplets descend through the lower-density hydrogen, the process releases heat by friction and leaves Saturn's outer layers depleted of helium. These descending droplets may have accumulated into a helium shell surrounding the core. Rainfalls of diamonds have been suggested to occur within Saturn, as well as in Jupiter and ice giants Uranus and Neptune; the outer atmosphere of Saturn contains 3.25 % helium by volume. The proportion of helium is deficient compared to the abundance of this element in the Sun; the quantity of elements heavier than helium is not known but the proportions are assumed to match the primordial abundances from the formation of the Solar System. The total mass of these heavier elements is estimated to be 19–31 times the mass of the Earth, with a significant fraction located in Saturn's core region. Trace amounts of ammonia, ethane, propane and methane have been detected in Saturn's atmosphere; the upper clouds are composed of ammonia crystals, while the lower level clouds appear to consist of either ammonium hydrosulfide or water.
Ultraviolet radiation from the Sun causes methane ph
Norse mythology
Norse mythology is the body of myths of the North Germanic peoples, stemming from Norse paganism and continuing after the Christianization of Scandinavia, into the Scandinavian folklore of the modern period. The northernmost extension of Germanic mythology, Norse mythology consists of tales of various deities and heroes derived from numerous sources from both before and after the pagan period, including medieval manuscripts, archaeological representations, folk tradition; the source texts mention numerous gods, such as the hammer-wielding, humanity-protecting thunder-god Thor, who relentlessly fights his foes. Most of the surviving mythology centres on the plights of the gods and their interaction with various other beings, such as humanity and the jötnar, beings who may be friends, foes or family members of the gods; the cosmos in Norse mythology consists of Nine Worlds that flank Yggdrasil. Units of time and elements of the cosmology are personified as beings. Various forms of a creation myth are recounted, where the world is created from the flesh of the primordial being Ymir, the first two humans are Ask and Embla.
These worlds are foretold to be reborn after the events of Ragnarök when an immense battle occurs between the gods and their enemies, the world is enveloped in flames, only to be reborn anew. There the surviving gods will meet, the land will be fertile and green, two humans will repopulate the world. Norse mythology has been the subject of scholarly discourse since the 17th century, when key texts were brought to the attention of the intellectual circles of Europe. By way of comparative mythology and historical linguistics, scholars have identified elements of Germanic mythology reaching as far back as Proto-Indo-European mythology. During the modern period, the Romanticist Viking revival re-awoke an interest in the subject matter, references to Norse mythology may now be found throughout modern popular culture; the myths have further been revived in a religious context among adherents of Germanic Neopaganism. The historical religion of the Norse people is referred to as Norse mythology. In certain literature the terms Scandinavian mythology or Nordic mythology have been used.
Norse mythology is attested in dialects of Old Norse, a North Germanic language spoken by the Scandinavian people during the European Middle Ages, the ancestor of modern Scandinavian languages. The majority of these Old Norse texts were created in Iceland, where the oral tradition stemming from the pre-Christian inhabitants of the island was collected and recorded in manuscripts; this occurred in the 13th century. These texts include the Prose Edda, composed in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, the Poetic Edda, a collection of poems from earlier traditional material anonymously compiled in the 13th century; the Prose Edda was composed as a prose manual for producing skaldic poetry—traditional Old Norse poetry composed by skalds. Composed and transmitted orally, skaldic poetry utilizes alliterative verse and various metrical forms; the Prose Edda presents numerous examples of works by various skalds from before and after the Christianization process and frequently refers back to the poems found in the Poetic Edda.
The Poetic Edda consists entirely of poems, with some prose narrative added, this poetry—Eddic poetry—utilizes fewer kennings. In comparison to skaldic poetry, Eddic poetry is unadorned; the Prose Edda features layers of euhemerization, a process in which deities and supernatural beings are presented as having been either actual, magic-wielding human beings who have been deified in time or beings demonized by way of Christian mythology. Texts such as Heimskringla, composed in the 13th century by Snorri and Gesta Danorum, composed in Latin by Saxo Grammaticus in Denmark in the 12th century, are the results of heavy amounts of euhemerization. Numerous further texts, such as the sagas, provide further information; the saga corpus consists of thousands of tales recorded in Old Norse ranging from Icelandic family histories to Migration period tales mentioning historic figures such as Attila the Hun. Objects and monuments such as the Rök Runestone and the Kvinneby amulet feature runic inscriptions—texts written in the runic alphabet, the indigenous alphabet of the Germanic peoples—that mention figures and events from Norse mythology.
Objects from the archaeological record may be interpreted as depictions of subjects from Norse mythology, such as amulets of the god Thor's hammer Mjölnir found among pagan burials and small silver female figures interpreted as valkyries or dísir, beings associated with war, fate or ancestor cults. By way of historical linguistics and comparative mythology, comparisons to other attested branches of Germanic mythology may lend insight. Wider comparisons to the
Cirrus cloud
Cirrus is a genus of atmospheric cloud characterized by thin, wispy strands, giving the type its name from the Latin word cirrus, meaning a ringlet or curling lock of hair. This cloud can form at 45,000 ft above sea level; the strands of cloud sometimes appear in tufts of a distinctive form referred to by the common name of "mares' tails". From the surface of Earth, cirrus appears white, or a light grey in color, it forms when water vapor undergoes deposition at altitudes above 5,500 m in temperate regions and above 6,400 m in tropical regions. It forms from the outflow of tropical cyclones or the anvils of cumulonimbus clouds. Since cirrus clouds arrive in advance of the frontal system or tropical cyclone, it indicates that weather conditions may soon deteriorate. While it indicates the arrival of precipitation, cirrus clouds only produce fall streaks. Jet stream-powered cirrus can grow long enough to stretch across continents while remaining only a few kilometers deep; when visible light interacts with the ice crystals in cirrus cloud, it produces optical phenomena such as sun dogs and halos.
Cirrus is known to raise the temperature of the air beneath the main cloud layer by an average of 10 °C. When the individual filaments become so extensive that they are indistinguishable from one another, they form a sheet of high cloud called cirrostratus. Convection at high altitudes can produce another high-based genus called cirrocumulus, a pattern of small cloud tufts that contain droplets of supercooled water; some polar stratospheric clouds can resemble cirrus, while noctilucent clouds are structured in a way, similar to cirrus. Cirrus clouds form on other planets, including Mars, Saturn and Neptune, they have been seen on Titan, one of Saturn's moons. Some of these extraterrestrial cirrus clouds are composed of ammonia or methane ice rather than water ice; the term cirrus is used for certain interstellar clouds composed of sub-micrometer-sized dust grains. Cirrus clouds range in thickness from 100 m with an average thickness of 1,500 m. There are, on average, 30 ice crystals per liter, but this ranges from one ice crystal per 10,000 liters to 10,000 ice crystals per liter, a difference of eight orders of magnitude.
The length of each of these ice crystals is 0.25 millimeters long, but they range from as short as 0.01 millimeters or as long as several millimeters. The ice crystals in contrails are much smaller than those in occurring cirrus cloud, as they are around 0.001 millimeters to 0.1 millimeters in length. Cirrus can vary in temperature from −20 °C to −30 °C; the ice crystals in cirrus clouds have different shapes in addition to different sizes. Some shapes include solid columns, hollow columns, plates and conglomerations of the various other types; the shape of the ice crystals is determined by the air temperature, atmospheric pressure, ice supersaturation. Cirrus in temperate regions have the shapes segregated by type: the columns and plates tend to be at the top of the cloud, whereas the rosettes and conglomerations tend to be near the base. In the northern Arctic region, cirrus clouds tend to be composed up of only the columns and conglomerations, these crystals tend to be at least four times larger than the minimum size.
In Antarctica, cirrus are composed of only the columns, these columns are much longer than normal. Scientists have studied the characteristics of cirrus using several different methods. One, Light Detection and Ranging, gives accurate information on the cloud's altitude and width. Balloon-carried hygrometers give information on the humidity of the cirrus cloud but are not accurate enough to measure the depth of the cloud. Radar units give information on the thicknesses of cirrus clouds. Another data source is satellite measurements from the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment program; these satellites measure where infrared radiation is absorbed in the atmosphere, if it is absorbed at cirrus altitudes it is assumed that there are cirrus clouds in that location. The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration's MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer gives information on the cirrus cloud cover by measuring reflected infrared radiation of various specific frequencies during the day.
During the night, it determines cirrus cover by detecting the Earth's infrared emissions. The cloud reflects this radiation back to the ground, thus enabling satellites to see the "shadow" it casts into space. Visual observations from aircraft or the ground provide additional information about cirrus clouds. Based on data taken from the United States using these methods, cirrus cloud cover was found to vary diurnally and seasonally; the researchers found that in the summer, at noon, the cover is the lowest, with an average of 23% of the United States' land area covered by cirrus. Around midnight, the cloud cover increases to around 28%. In winter, the cirrus cloud cover did not vary appreciably from day to night; these percentages include clear days and nights, as well as days and nights with other cloud types, as lack of cirrus cloud cover. When these clouds are present, the typical coverage ranges from 30% to 50%. Based on satellite data, cirrus covers an average of 20% to 25% of the Earth's surface.
In the tropical regions, this cloud covers around 70% of the region's
Nuremberg Chronicle
The Nuremberg Chronicle is an illustrated biblical paraphrase and world history that follows the story of human history related in the Bible. Written in Latin by Hartmann Schedel, with a version in German, translation by Georg Alt, it appeared in 1493, it is one of the best-documented early printed books—an incunabulum—and one of the first to integrate illustrations and text. Latin scholars refer to it as Liber Chronicarum as this phrase appears in the index introduction of the Latin edition. English-speakers have long referred to it as the Nuremberg Chronicle after the city in which it was published. German-speakers refer to it as Die Schedelsche Weltchronik in honour of its author. Two Nuremberg merchants, Sebald Schreyer and his son-in-law, Sebastian Kammermeister, commissioned the Latin version of the chronicle, they commissioned George Alt, a scribe at the Nuremberg treasury, to translate the work into German. Both Latin and German editions were printed in Nuremberg; the contracts were recorded by scribes, bound into volumes, deposited in the Nuremberg City Archives.
The first contract, from December, 1491, established the relationship between the illustrators and the patrons. Wolgemut and Pleydenwurff, the painters, were to provide the layout of the chronicle, to oversee the production of the woodcuts, to guard the designs against piracy; the patrons agreed to advance 1000 gulden for paper, printing costs, the distribution and sale of the book. A second contract, between the patrons and the printer, was executed in March 1492, it stipulated conditions for managing the printing. The blocks and the archetype were to be returned to the patrons; the author of the text, Hartmann Schedel, was a medical doctor and book collector. He earned a doctorate in medicine in Padua in 1466 settled in Nuremberg to practice medicine and collect books. According to an inventory done in 1498, Schedel's personal library contained 370 manuscripts and 670 printed books; the author used passages from the classical and medieval works in this collection to compose the text of Chronicle.
He borrowed most from another humanist chronicle, Supplementum Chronicarum, by Jacob Philip Foresti of Bergamo. It has been estimated that about 90% of the text is pieced together from works on humanities, science and theology, while about 10% of the chronicle is Schedel's original composition. Nuremberg was one of the largest cities in the Holy Roman Empire in the 1490s, with a population of between 45,000 and 50,000. Thirty-five patrician families comprised the City Council; the Council controlled all aspects of printing and craft activities, including the size of each profession and the quality and type of goods produced. Although dominated by a conservative aristocracy, Nuremberg was a centre of northern humanism. Anton Koberger, printer of the Nuremberg Chronicle, printed the first humanist book in Nuremberg in 1472. Sebald Shreyer, one of the patrons of the chronicle, commissioned paintings from classical mythology for the grand salon of his house. Hartmann Schedel, author of the chronicle, was an avid collector of both Italian Renaissance and German humanist works.
Hieronymus Münzer, who assisted Schedel in writing the chronicle's chapter on geography, was among this group, as were Albrecht Dürer and Johann and Willibald Pirckheimer. The Chronicle was first published in Latin on 12 July 1493 in the city of Nuremberg; this was followed by a German translation on 23 December 1493. An estimated 1400 to 1500 Latin and 700 to 1000 German copies were published. A document from 1509 records that 60 German versions had not been sold. 400 Latin and 300 German copies survived into the twenty-first century. The larger illustrations were sold separately as prints hand-coloured in watercolour. Many copies of the book are coloured, with varying degrees of skill; the colouring on some examples has been added much and some copies have been broken up for sale as decorative prints. The publisher and printer was Anton Koberger, the godfather of Albrecht Dürer, who in the year of Dürer's birth in 1471 ceased goldsmithing to become a printer and publisher, he became the most successful publisher in Germany owning 24 printing presses and having many offices in Germany and abroad, from Lyon to Buda.
The chronicle is an illustrated world history, in which the contents are divided into seven ages: First age: from creation to the Deluge Second age: up to the birth of Abraham Third age: up to King David Fourth age: up to the Babylonian captivity Fifth age: up to the birth of Jesus Christ Sixth age: up to the present time Seventh age: outlook on the end of the world and the Last Judgment The large workshop of Michael Wolgemut Nuremberg's leading artist in various media, provided the unprecedented 1,809 woodcut illustrations. Sebastian Kammermeister and Sebald Schreyer financed the printing in a contract dated March 16, 1492, although preparations had been well under way for several years. Wolgemut and his stepson Wilhelm Pleydenwurff were first commissioned to provide the illustrations in 1487-88, a further contract of December 29, 1491, commissioned manuscript layouts of the text and illustrations. Albrecht Dürer was an apprentice with Wolgemut from 1486 to 1489, so may well have participated in designing some of the illustrations for the specialist craftsmen who cut the blocks, onto which the design had been drawn, or a
Light pillar
A light pillar is an atmospheric optical phenomenon in which a vertical beam of light appears to extend above and/or below a light source. The effect is created by the reflection of light from tiny ice crystals that are suspended in the atmosphere or that comprise high-altitude clouds. If the light comes from the Sun, the phenomenon is called solar pillar. Light pillars can be caused by the Moon or terrestrial sources, such as streetlights. Since they are caused by the interaction of light with ice crystals, light pillars belong to the family of halos; the crystals responsible for light pillars consist of flat, hexagonal plates, which tend to orient themselves more or less horizontally as they fall through the air. Each flake acts as a tiny mirror which reflects light sources which are directly above or below it, the presence of flakes at a spread of altitudes causes the reflection to be elongated vertically into a column; the larger and more numerous the crystals, the more pronounced. More column-shaped crystals can cause light pillars as well.
In cold weather, the ice crystals can be suspended near the ground, in which case they are referred to as diamond dust. Unlike a light beam, a light pillar is not physically located below the light source, its appearance of a vertical line is an optical illusion, resulting from the collective reflection off the ice crystals, only those of which that appear to lie in a vertical line direct the light rays towards the observer. Crepuscular rays Diamond dust Halo Light beam Sun dog Crown flash False sunrise False sunset Pillars. Atmospheric Optics. Explanations and many images. Light Pillars: An Introduction to Sun Pillars and Related Phenomena; the Weather Doctor's Weather Eyes. Another nice explanation, all on one page Fabulous frozen frames – Sydney Morning Herald. November 1, 2006 A Sun Pillar Over North Carolina. NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, 15 December 2008
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