Starship Asterisk*

Raven wrote:

neufer wrote:
Canis Minor and Canis Major are his dogs, the one in front is called Procyon. They chase Lepus, the hare, although Hyginus says some critics thought this too base a prey for the noble Orion and have him pursuing Taurus, the bull, instead.

The Mithraic iconography features Mithras killing a bull, surrounded by a dog, a snake, a scorpion, a raven, and other images. Statues of twins holding torches (one upright, one inverted) would stand near the entrance of a Mithraeum. It has been suggested that all these represented constellations, Mithras himself being the one we call Orion.

neufer wrote:Canis Minor and Canis Major are his dogs, the one in front is called Procyon. They chase Lepus, the hare, although Hyginus says some critics thought this too base a prey for the noble Orion and have him pursuing Taurus, the bull, instead.

casus wrote:Is it possible that there is apparent motion of stars over just one human lifetime???
I ask because it seems, in memory from my childhood (60's , early 70's) that the belt stars of Orion comprised a perfectly straight line. Now it appears that, looking up with his 'head' on top, that there is a slight dip, with the center star just below the line defined by the east and west belt stars. Am I nuts???

JoseMac wrote:
Shouldn't that be " Taak saamal"?

• taak f (plural taken, diminutive taakje): task

Chris Peterson wrote:

casus wrote:
Is it possible that there is apparent motion of stars over just one human lifetime???

I ask because it seems, in memory from my childhood (60's , early 70's) that the belt stars of Orion comprised a perfectly straight line. Now it appears that, looking up with his 'head' on top, that there is a slight dip, with the center star just below the line defined by the east and west belt stars. Am I nuts???

It's your memory that has shifted, not the stars.

While all stars move relative to each other, the positions of the naked eye stars do not change perceptibly over a single lifetime. Indeed, the positions of the stars in Orion don't look visibly different today than they did in star charts from several hundred years ago.

Could casus possibly be 150,000 years old (as old as dirt)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_%28constellation%29 wrote:
<<Orion's stars will gradually move away from the constellation due to proper motion. However, Orion's brightest stars all lie at a large distance from the Earth on an astronomical scale—much farther away than Sirius, for example. Orion will still be recognizable long after most of the other constellations—composed of relatively nearby stars—have distorted into new configurations, with the exception of a few of its stars eventually exploding as supernovae, for example Betelgeuse, which is predicted to explode sometime in the next million years.>>

Chris Peterson wrote:

starsurfer wrote:
I love the combination of the ancient structure and the ancient light of the stars in the sky! However it is strange to see Orion described as a "modern" constellation, I thought it was one of the original Ptolemaic constellations?

Semantics, maybe? While most of the asterisms we see in the constellations have been recognized for thousands of years, the constellations themselves are a modern invention- 88 regions of the sky mapped out in the 1920s and 1930s. These "modern" constellations were, in many cases, drawn to include the classical asterisms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy wrote:
Claudius Ptolemy (Greek: Κλαύδιος Πτολεμαῖος, Klaudios Ptolemaios; Latin: Claudius Ptolemaeus;
c. AD 90 – c. AD 168) was a Greek-Roman citizen of Egypt who wrote in Greek.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization wrote:
<<The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems. Initially established during the Pre-Classic period (c. 2000 BC to AD 250), according to the Mesoamerican chronology, many Maya cities reached their highest state of development during the Classic period (c. AD 250 to 900), and continued throughout the Post-Classic period until the arrival of the Spanish.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_%28mythology%29 wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]An engraving of Orion from Johann Bayer's Uranometria, 1603[/color][/b]

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<<Orion (Ancient Greek: Ὠρίων or Ὠαρίων, Latin: Orion) was a giant huntsman in Greek mythology whom Zeus placed among the stars as the constellation of Orion. The constellation is mentioned in Horace's Odes (Ode 3.27.18), Homer's Odyssey (Book 5, line 283) and Iliad, and Virgil's Aeneid (Book 1, line 535).

Although Orion has a few lines in both Homeric poems [c. 750 BC] and in [Hesiod's] Works and Days [c. 700 BC], most of the stories about him are recorded in incidental allusions and in fairly obscure later writings. No great poet standardized the legend. The ancient sources for Orion's legend are mostly notes in the margins of ancient poets (scholia) or compilations by later scholars, the equivalent of modern reference works or encyclopedias; even the legend from Hesiod's Astronomy survives only in one such compilation.

Another narrative on the constellations, three paragraphs long, is from a Latin writer whose brief notes have come down to us under the name of Hyginus [c. 5 AD]. It tells two stories of the death of Orion. The first says that because of his "living joined in too great a friendship" with Oenopion, he boasted to Artemis and Leto that he could kill anything which came from Earth. Earth objected and created the Scorpion. He connects Orion with several constellations, not just Scorpio. Orion chased Pleione, the mother of the Pleiades, for seven years, until Zeus intervened and raised all of them to the stars. In Works and Days, Orion chases the Pleiades themselves. Canis Minor and Canis Major are his dogs, the one in front is called Procyon. They chase Lepus, the hare, although Hyginus says some critics thought this too base a prey for the noble Orion and have him pursuing Taurus, the bull, instead.

The Bible mentions Orion three times, naming it "Kesil" (כסיל, literally - fool).>>

starsurfer wrote:I love the combination of the ancient structure and the ancient light of the stars in the sky! However it is strange to see Orion described as a "modern" constellation, I thought it was one of the original Ptolemaic constellations?

casus wrote:Is it possible that there is apparent motion of stars over just one human lifetime???
I ask because it seems, in memory from my childhood (60's , early 70's) that the belt stars of Orion comprised a perfectly straight line. Now it appears that, looking up with his 'head' on top, that there is a slight dip, with the center star just below the line defined by the east and west belt stars. Am I nuts???

Keyman wrote:
Don't get too smug yet.

There's still 15.5 hours of "the last day" to get through.

(The Mayans were on Central Standard Time, weren't they?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day wrote:
<<Ancient custom has a new day start at either
the rising or setting of the Sun on the local horizon.>>