When you gaze upon the night sky, especially in the dark skies of the countryside, you can see all kinds of people and creatures up there. Right now, there's a disgraced hunter turned hero, two bears, another mighty hunter chasing the bears, a goose, a giant scorpion, a dolphin, a harp, a stretched out dragon and a winged horse among them. If you can honestly see all of them for what they're supposed to be, you either have a great imagination or you're a big liar. The vast majority of constellations just don't look like what they're supposed to be, not even in the dark countryside.
Honestly, this week will also make it tough to spot constellations because of the full or nearly full moon. Next week, it will be a whole lot easier.
To create constellations, we do the same thing our distant ancestors did. We connect the stars with imaginary lines to come up with images, just like dot-to-dot puzzles in a kid's coloring book. Unlike the coloring book, though, the stars that make up the dots are of varying brightness; plus, there are no numbers by the stars. We have to decide what stars to connect with our mind's eye.
Back then, ancient civilizations watched the stars rise in the east and set in the west in the course of a night. At the same time, the stars would gradually migrate westward from night to night through the course of one year. From those motions, they made clocks and calendars.
Those ancient people thought the stars, wandering stars (now known as planets), the sun and the moon were fixed on big transparent spheres that surrounded and revolved around the Earth in complicated patterns. In many cultures, the stars themselves were seen as gods or other forms of divinity. I love the old theory that stars were peepholes through which you can view heaven.
Just as people do now, our ancestors tried to make sense out of the randomness of the multitudes of the stars that greeted them every night. They connected the stars the best they could to make pictures that were mainly meant to commemorate or celebrate a person, god, animal or even an object in the sky.
Many believed these cosmic pictures were divinely designed. The pictures they came up with were based on local legends and mythology. It's quite apparent that it didn't really matter to them that the constellations didn't quite match what was being portrayed; the familiar patterns were handy story-telling tools around a campfire.
With the absence of books, videos and Facebook, the constellation pictures were also great for passing down local mythology and legends through the generations. That's because the star patterns never seemed to change in size or shape. In reality, the stars change positions relative to each other in the sky while they orbit at various speeds around the Milky Way Galaxy, but not enough to radically change constellations for thousands of years. We still see basically the same constellations in the space age as were seen in the Stone Age.
No one knows exactly when people started seeing these pictures in the sky. There are some artifacts and ancient texts from ancient Sumeria, present day Iraq, that go back more than 5,000 years showing that people recognized constellations. Scholars have concluded that even back then they already had a lion, a bull and a scorpion as constellations. We see all three of these in our skies today in more or less the same form as Leo the Lion, Taurus the Bull and Scorpius the Scorpion.
Many other civilizations like the Egyptians, Chinese, Babylonians, Native Americans and many others developed and spread their constellation lore. The funny thing is that many different cultures, separated by vast distances, have similar names or interpretations for some of the same constellations. For example, many cultures saw the Big Bear as the Big Bear. To this day, how and why this happened is still a mystery.
By the time the second century rolled around, the famous Greek astronomer Ptolemy had cataloged 48 constellations, some of which were borrowed from the Babylonians and others. He published these constellations and other information in his great work, the Almagest. The Greek lore of the constellations is very colorful and many of the stories are still well known to this day. You can easily call them the earliest of soap operas and many are not exactly family friendly. They're based on Greek mythology involving Zeus and Hera, the King and Queen of the gods, and their highly dysfunctional courtship and marriage. Other celestial soap operas involve Ares, the god of war, Poseidon, the god of the sea, and others.
Presently, the sky is divided into 88 constellations, some big, some small, some bright and some dim. Astronomers have done this to refine the geography of the night sky for mapping purposes. Technically, every part of the skies is part of one of constellation or another. Constellations actually have arbitrary parallel and perpendicular boundaries. The familiar and not so familiar star pictures lie within the boundaries.
The only place you can see all 88 constellations through the course of the year is along the equator. Locally, we can see about 65 to 70 constellations through the year. The constellations that never get above our horizon are due to the curvature of the Earth. Many of the constellations we can't see are visible from backyards in Australia and other locales in the southern hemisphere. The reverse is also true.
One of the strangest constellations we see around here is Sagittarius the Archer. According to Greek mythology, Sagittarius is supposed to be a half-man, half-horse firing an arrow. Good luck seeing that. Most see Sagittarius as a little teapot and honestly, that's what it really resembles in the early evening low southern sky. You can't miss it. Sagittarius is also in the direction of the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy. I'll have more on that next week in Starwatch.
(Lynch is an amateur astronomer and author of the book, "Stars, a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations." Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.)