The Antikythera Shipwreck: the Ship , the Treasures, the Mechanism
From April 5, 2012 to April 28, 2013, the exhibition "The Antikythera Shipwreck: the Ship , the Treasures, the Mechanism" will run at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece.
Project Overview
More than a hundred years ago an extraordinary mechanism was found by sponge divers at the bottom of the sea near the island of Antikythera. It astonished the whole international community of experts on the ancient world. Was it an astrolabe? Was it an orrery or an astronomical clock? Or something else?
Computed Tomography (CT)
As stated in the data page, extensive data from Computed Tomography (CT) can not be released online, since the data sets are much too large and are not exploitable "as is". But animations from CT reconstructions can be browsed as standard movies:
These movies were created in 2006 and 2008 with the VGStudio MAX software. Click on the links below for more videos and better resolution.
Second paper on the Antikythera Mechanism published in science journal Nature
A new paper from the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (AMRP) is published in the prestige science journal Nature on July 31st 2008. It reveals surprising results on the back dials of the Antikythera Mechanism - including a dial dedicated to the four-year Olympiad Cycle of athletic games in ancient Greece.
Digital Radiographs
The digital radiographs of all the known remaining fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism that were acquired by X-Tek Systems using their BladeRunner System are available for viewing and download on the website of Shaw Inspection Systems (formerly X-Tek Industrial).
The digital radiographs available include all the Main Fragments (fragments A to G) and the all the Small Fragments (fragments 1 to 75) and were obtained using X-Tek's BladeRunner CT system.
Solid Models
The first model of the Antikythera Mechanism was actually build in the 1930s by Ioannis Theofanides. A model based on Price's work was built in the 1980s by Robert Deroski and donated by Price to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. In Australia, clockmaker Frank Percival made a model based on the research done by Allan Bromley and Michael Wright, who subsequently developed his own model.
With the new results and the latest gearing diagram from the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, new models are being built by other researchers, with some being working models. The results of the AMRP have been integrated into at least three models, made by Michael Wright, Dionysios Kriaris, Massimo Vicentini and Tatjana van Vark, while the Research Group is developing a model based on the ongoing research.
Full resolution PTM
The surfaces of the 82 remaining fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism, imaged by the HP Labs team, are available for download at the HP Labs download page. 82 PTMs are listed, this number being a coincidence, since some small fragments are grouped into a single PTM, and the larger fragments are imaged on more than one PTM per fragment.
You will have to download the PTM viewer (available on the same page) to browse the data on your computer.
Old and new models of the Antikythera Mechanism
The latest model of the Antikythera Mechanism was published in Nature in November 2006. The evolution of models of the Mechanism has followed a long historical struggle to reconcile the evidence from the fragments with a coherent design based on a rational structure and function.
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