Here is a wider discussion in Nature of the Antikythera Mechanism I mentioned a few days ago.
This litle discussion starts to bring home a sense of the intricate sophistication of this two-thousand-year-old mechanism & makes an interesting read, as well as investigating some of the cultural mechanisms behind it (why, for example, is it one of a kind?) & the ship it went down in.
It has some excellent pictures of the mechanism & reconstructions.
Comments
It does map the Lunar wobble with a pair of cunning little gears, which I reckon helps your odds.
What they have left isn't the entire mechanism. They're interpreting the rest of it as I type and should be publishing what they find in a few weeks/months.
If I see anything interesting about exinoxes, I'll 'blog it.
On the back of the box are two spiral dials, one above the other. A pointer at the centre of each traces its way slowly around the spiral groove like a record stylus. The top dial, Wright explains, shows the Metonic cycle — 235 months fitting quite precisely into 19 years. The lower spiral, according to the research by Edmunds and his colleagues, was divided into 223, reflecting the 223-month period of the Saros cycle, which is used to predict eclipses.
How much weight you give the article, I don’t know, but it seems that many ancient structures were aligned to equinoxes.