Your Sirius comments back up my thought, that you'd probably have better luck going by a single star than a constellation. I think the actual astronomers are more likely to care about stars than constellations, while the astrologists and such are more likely to care about constellations than individual stars. So pick one or two stars in the Pleiades and search for information on them.
I have been using the star Alcyone as a way to roughly estimate the date range (I have a full year's worth of star data for that star that I'm combing through by hand right now, actually), but the 2° of size for the entire cluster actually makes a significant difference, about 4-6 days on either end. Add to this that there's also an issue with the actual date that you can observe something with your naked eye (trees, hills, and the silly natural features of the world conspire against our star-gazing all the time), and you might end up 2-3 weeks off if your calculation starts fuzzy. That's why I'm working on the entire cluster (or as much of it as I can get) as a baseline.
I just want to say that I find this absolutely fascinating and wonderful! Also, I'm pretty sure my 14-yr-old self has a huge intellectual crush on you right now.
I'll be honest, I didn't check your dates on said paper. It seemed convincing me!! I know you wouldn't but you probably could have put any dates down with such a lazy precepter to review them. :)
In all seriousness, I did TRY to confirm some of your dates (mostly because this idea made me curious) but ran into the same problem you had a gave up.
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In all seriousness, I did TRY to confirm some of your dates (mostly because this idea made me curious) but ran into the same problem you had a gave up.
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