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Old Mayas designed a very complicated calendar, and they also recorded important historical events and astronomical phenomena. Dresden Codex (DC), one of the four preserved Mayan hieroglyphic literal legacies, contains many of these, covering the classical period of Maya history. The records of these events in DC are given in the so-called Long Count (LC), the number of days elapsed from the origin of Maya chronology. The difference between LC and Julian Date, used in today's astronomy, is traditionally called correlation. More than fifty different values of the correlation have been published so far, and the differences among them can reach up to several centuries. The value, mostly accepted by Maya historians, is the one by Goodman-Martíez-Thompson (GMT), equal to 584 283 days. It is based mostly on events extracted from sources of the post-classical period of Maya history. Brothers Böhm used Maya astronomical records to derive the Böhm correlation (BB) of 622 261 days. It is in excellent agreement with the dates of astronomical phenomena recorded in DC. During past decades we published several papers supporting validity of the BB correlation. They are based on the records of different astronomical phenomena in DC and stelae, such as solar eclipses, planetary conjunctions, greatest elongations of Mercury and Venus from the Sun, or heliacal risings and settings. The present study is devoted to newly found recorded dates on page D74 of Dresden Codex. We were able to identify six of them with conjunctions of planets Venus through Saturn (corresponding to years 491, 495, 496, 501, 531, and 571), when BB correlation was applied.

The rich culture of old Maya gave birth to a very complicated and complex calendar; they also recorded important historical events and many significant astronomical phenomena. The main source of information is represented by Dresden Codex (DC), one of the four preserved Mayan hieroglyphic literal legacies. DC roughly covers the interval between 280 and 1325 AD. The old problem of precise Mayan dating with respect to our calendar is traditionally called correlation; it expresses the difference in days between the Long Count of the Mayan calendar and the Julian Date, used in presentday astronomy. There exist more than fifty published correlations that differ one from the other by as much as several centuries. Historians mostly accept the so called Goodman-Martínez-Thompson (GMT) value of 584 283 days, which is based mostly on historical events extracted from the sources of a postclassical period of Mayan history. On the contrary, brothers Böhm used precisely dated astronomical data from classical period to derive the Böhm correlation (BB) of 622 261 days. Unlike the GMT correlation it is in excellent agreement with the astronomical phenomena recorded in DC. Since then we published several papers supporting the validity of BB correlation and its advantage over GMT in the classical period of Mayan history. To this end, we used more records of astronomical phenomena discovered in DC. This study describes six records of planetary conjunctions that we found recently on p. 37 of DC that concern planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. All of these records coincide with the real occurrences of these phenomena within several days, if BB correlation is applied.

It is well known that the rich culture of old Maya contained, among other, also a very complicated and complex calendar, in which they recorded not only historical events, but also significant astronomical phenomena. Main source of information is the Dresden Codex, roughly covering the interval between 280 and 1325 AD. The problem of the so-called correlation between Mayan and our calendars (expressing the difference between Long Count of Mayan calendar and Julian date) is very old, there exist about fifty different solutions that mutually differ by up to hundreds of years. Out of these, historians mostly accept the so-called Goodman - Martínez - Thompson (GMT) value of 584 283 days, which is based almost entirely on historical events. On the contrary, we stressed very precisely dated astronomical data, demonstrated the contradictions of GMT with them, and derived the so-called Böhm correlation (BB) of 622 261 days, which is in excellent agreement with astronomical phenomena recorded in Dresden Codex. Maya researchers are mostly convinced that Maya did not pay much attention to Mercury. Here we conclude that the truth is opposite; we analyze the data in Dresden Codex and find many records corresponding to visibility of Mercury near its maximum elongations from the Sun, and also to their conjunctions.

The relationship between Maya and our calendar is expressed by a coefficient known as ‘correlation’ which is a number of days that we have to add to the Mayan Long Count date to get Julian Date used in astronomy. There is surprisingly large uncertainty in the value of the correlation, yielding a shift between both calendars (and thus between the history of Maya and of our world) to typically several hundred years. There are more than 50 diverse values of the correlation, some of them derived from historical, other by astronomical data. We test here (among others) the well established Goodman-Martínez-Thompson correlation (GMT), based on historical data, and the Böhms’ one (B&B), based on astronomical data decoded from the Dresden Codex (DC); this correlation differs by about +104 years from the GMT. In our previous works we used several astronomical phenomena as recorded in the DC for a check. We clearly demonstrated that (i) the GMT was not capable to predict these phenomena that really happened in nature and (ii) that the GMT predicts them on the days when they did not occur. The phenomena used till now in the test are, however, short-periodic and the test then may suffer from ambiguity. Therefore, we add long-periodic astronomical phenomena, decoded successfully from the DC, to the testing. These are (i) a synchrony of Venusian heliacal risings with the solar eclipses, (ii) a synchrony of Venus and Mars conjunctions with the eclipses, (iii) conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn repeated in a rare way, and (iv) a synchrony of synodic and sideric periods of Mercury with the tropical year. Based on our analysis, we find that the B&B correlation yields the best agreement with the astronomical phenomena observed by the Maya. Therefore we recommend to reject the GMT and support the B&B correlation.