Astronomers of the Maya Indians discovered the principles of planetary motion in the sky long before Copernicus created the heliocentric model.
The artifact called "The Dresden Codex" is a copy created in the 11th century from a Mayan manuscript written in the 8th century AD. This manuscript served as the key to deciphering the writing of this mysterious civilization of the ancient Indians.
The "Dresden Code" consists of 74 pages and contains religious, scientific data, information about ceremonies, holidays, as well as mathematical and astronomical calculations - predictions of eclipses and the nature of the movement of the moon in the sky.
Gerardo Aldana from the University of California at Santa Barbara (USA) studied one of the most obscure parts of the codex - the Venus tablets, which contain calculations of the motion of Venus in the sky and a 584-day calendar based on these calculations.
Aldana studied the tables for a long time and found out that they are talking not just about the position of Venus at specific periods of time, but about the very real astronomical discovery - about a long-term calculation of the position of Venus in the firmament, taking into account errors that occur hundreds and thousands of years later.
The Maya knew that Venus makes a circle in the sky and returns to the point where it was at the time of the beginning of observations, not in 584 days, but in 583.92. Using this figure, Native American astronomers calculated corrective values and created formulas to be applied to the Codex values to calculate the position of Venus.
The Indians could not have come up with such a calculation system if they did not understand that Venus, the Earth and other planets revolve around the Sun, and not the Sun revolves around them. The Indian Observatory was located at Chichen Itza (Caracol building).
The Mayan civilization reached the level of the founders of European astronomy, such as Copernicus, several centuries earlier.
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