Tonight a rather interesting alignment occurs as the Pleiades are in conjunction with the Moon, something depicted in ancient scientific art.

A few years ago I was introduced to a remarkable piece of bronze age science, the Nebra Sky Disk. It is thought to date to around 1600BCE and shows what could be seen as the crescent moon, the full moon and the Pleiades. I had the good fortune to visit both the museum in Halle, where the disk is on display, and Mittelberg where it was found.

The configuration shown on the disk points to two dates in the year. The crescent moon conjunction would occur in the western sky just after sunset, approximately 3 days after new moon in April. This is  the point where the Pleiades disappear into the Earth at sunset, which in some cultures is seen as the handful of seeds being planted into the ground.

The full moon conjunction will occur today! This is almost aligned with the achronycal rise of the Pleiades, something which may be seen as the timing behind the origins of the day of the dead. The Pleiades are related to the ancestors and this is the day on which they take their place amongst the stars. The Stellarium screenshot I used below shows the rise of the moon and the Pleiades at Halle in Germany, where the conjunction will be most pronounced.

One thing to note, however, is that this is not the same months with which the disk would have originally worked. The cycle of precession of the equinoxes has changed our skies in the last 3600 years. This would mean that the spring event would occur just before the March equinox and the autumn event would occur just after the autumn equinox. Perhaps these may have been even more connected with both the planting and harvest seasons.