Dot-to-dot puzzles in the heavens
When you gaze at the Butler night sky, especially in the dark 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 them, a goose, a dolphin, a harp, a stretched-out dragon and a winged horse among them.
If you can honestly see all of them as what they’re supposed to be, you either have a great imagination or you’re a big liar. Most constellations just don’t look like what they’re supposed to be, even in the countryside. Moreover, this week it will be tougher still to spot constellations because the moonlight is increasing as we approach a full moon next Monday; later next week it will be a lot easier.
To create constellations, we do the same thing our distant ancestors did. We connect the stars with imaginary lines to create images just like dot-to-dot puzzles in a kid’s coloring book. But unlike those puzzles, the stars that make up the dots vary in brightness, and there are no numbers by the stars. We must decide what image to connect together with our mind’s eye.
Ancient civilizations watched the stars rise in the east and set in the west over the course of a night. At the same time, the stars gradually migrated westward from night to night over the course of a 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 Earth in complicated patterns. Many cultures saw the stars themselves as gods or other forms of divinity. I love one old theory which posited that stars were peepholes through which you could view heaven.
Just as people do now, our ancestors tried to make sense out of the randomness of the stars that greeted them every night. They connected the stars the best they could to make pictures which meant to commemorate or celebrate a person, god, animal or even an object in the sky. It’s clear it didn’t matter to them if the constellations didn’t quite match what they portrayed — the familiar patterns were handy storytelling tools around a campfire.
Without the plethora of media sources we have today, 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 as they orbit the Milky Way galaxy at different speeds, but not enough to radically change the images of 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. Artifacts and texts from ancient Sumeria, now present-day Iraq, go back more than 5,000 years and show that people recognized constellations. Scholars have concluded that back then they 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.
Other civilizations like the Egyptians, Chinese, Babylonians, Native Americans and many others developed and spread their own constellation lore. Coincidentally, 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 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 many, many others.
Presently the sky is divided up into 88 constellations, some big, some small, some bright and others dim. Astronomers have done this to refine the geography of the night sky for mapping purposes. Technically, every part of the sky is part of one constellation or another. Constellations actually have arbitrary parallel and perpendicular boundaries. Star pictures lay within these boundaries.
The only place you can see all 88 constellations throughout the year is along the equator. Around here we can see about 65 to 70 constellations through the year.
The constellations that never rise above our horizon are due to Earth's curvature. Many of the constellations we can’t see are visible from backyards in Australia and other locales in the southern hemisphere and vice versa.
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 folks, including yours truly, see Sagittarius as a little teapot. In late October at the end of evening twilight the celestial teapot is in the very low southwestern sky tipping toward the horizon.
Enjoy all the pictures the night skies has to offer!
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is also the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at adventurepublications.net. Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.
