just what are your opinions of the Trojan War's place in history? Do you believe it was a record of a specific campaign, or just a general summary of a long period of hostility between the Greek mainland and the Ionian colonies and/or the city states on the Turkish peninsula? Keep in mind, "Troy" was the country, "Ilium" the fortified city. Many of the combatants in the Iliad were Trojan allies of Illium from the surrounding countryside, not residents of the city itself. They were probably petty village chieftains like Odysseus. Also, it's pretty clear that keeping a 50,000 man expeditionary force supplied in the field for a 10 year period was beyond the logistic capabilities of the age, there must be quite a bit of poetic license and exaggeration in the text. To the Classical Greeks that studied Homer like we do the Bible, this conflict was as far back in their past as the Vikings are to ours.

There are few a clues scattered in the text, such as the fact that writing appears nowhere in the Odyssey or Iliad, and it appears to be a product of a pre-literate society. Also, the military tactics of the combatants seem to be a holdover from an earlier age, and not consistent with those of the Iron Age societies that actually committed the original oral tradition to a fixed written text.

I've noticed other intriguing clues, for example, the role of women in both poems is often a key one, with intelligent, strong and capabable females, both among the mortal and immortal characters. This is not the subservient and misogynistic position of women during the Classical age.

Sorry, I can't help you with the astronomical questions, although I must confess to not being very confident of calculations based on the moon's motion, which, in my opinion, is not sufficently well understood to justify detailed predictions that far up the line.