Starship Asterisk*

messier.palette wrote:This is such a great annotation! Like Boomer, above, I'd love to see more like this. I love the concept and implementation of this one!

messier.palette wrote:Thanks Ann! Oh my, so lovely.

moontrail wrote:I miss it were also mentioned as Ursa Major, the Great Bear.

messier.palette wrote:

moontrail wrote:
I miss it were also mentioned as Ursa Major, the Great Bear.

You're right, the Big Dipper is part of Ursa Major.

The handle of the Big Dipper is the tail of the Great Bear.

And the cup of the Big Dipper is the haunch (hip, flank) of the Great Bear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Minor wrote:
<<Leo Minor lies between the larger and more recognizable Ursa Major to the north and Leo to the south. Leo Minor was not regarded as a separate constellation by classical astronomers; it was designated by Johannes Hevelius in 1687. The constellation also includes two stars with planetary systems, two pairs of interacting galaxies, and the unique deep-sky object Hanny's Voorwerp.>>

messier.palette wrote:You're right, the Big Dipper is part of Ursa Major.

The handle of the Big Dipper is the tail of the Great Bear.

Amd the cup of the Big Dipper is the haunch (hip, flank) of the Great Bear.

Chris Peterson wrote:

messier.palette wrote:
The handle of the Big Dipper is the tail of the Great Bear.

Amd the cup of the Big Dipper is the haunch (hip, flank) of the Great Bear.

Well, maybe. Certainly, we see many modern attempts to place a bear on the asterism in this fashion. However, given that the star pattern really looks nothing like a bear, and that the association with a bear predates by millennia any description of just how those stars were supposed to represent one, who knows? It's possible that there was originally no physical mapping between the asterism and a bear at all, just some lost bit of mythology.

• Azophi Fixed that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Fixed_Stars wrote:

---

The Great Bear. The familiar seven stars of the "Big Dipper", recorded by Ptolemy, are visible in the rump and tail, but notice they occur as a mirror-image of what we actually see because Al Sufi provided two images of each constellation, one as we see it in the night sky and one as seen here on a celestial globe. The image is from the [1009 AD] copy in the Bodleian Library, the oldest copy extant.

The Book of Fixed Stars is an astronomical text written by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (Azophi) around 964. The book was written in Arabic, although the author himself was Persian. It was an attempt to create a synthesis of the most popular classical work of astronomy – Ptolemy’s Almagest – with the indigenous Arabic astronomical tradition, or anwa. The book was thoroughly illustrated along with observations and descriptions of the stars, their positions, their magnitudes (brightness) and their color. His results were set out constellation by constellation. For each constellation, he provided two drawings, one from the outside of a celestial globe, and the other from the inside. The work was highly influential and survives in numerous manuscripts and translations. The oldest manuscript, kept in the Bodleian Library, dates to 1009 and is the work of the author's son.>>

http://www.worldhistoryblog.com/2006/10 ... tions.html


The Origin of the Greek Constellations
Scientific American, Monday, October 30, 2006
by Bradley E. Schaefer.

<<Was the Great Bear constellation named before hunter nomads first reached the Americas more than 13,000 years ago? This article claims this may be the case as Ursa Major does not really look like a bear yet communities in Europe, Asia, and the Americas call the constellation the great bear. Hence, it is likely the constellation was named before settlers first arrived in North America. From the article:

• My grandfather first taught me about the Great Bear constellation. After that, I had fun wielding an old pair of binoculars and picking out other constellations in the wide sky over Colorado--or even inventing my own. At the time, of course, I gave no thought to the age or origin of the constellations, but the curious pictures in the sky present a fascinating scientific puzzle.
  
  In 1922, when the International Astronomical Union officially defined 88 constellations, it drew the bulk of them from Ptolemy's The Almagest, which was written around A.D. 150 and described the traditions widespread among the Greeks. These traditions had been popularized in the "best-selling" poem The Phaenomena, by Aratus (275 B.C.). The great astronomer Hipparchus's sole surviving book, The Commentary (147 B.C.), tells us that Aratus's poem is for the most part a copy of a work with the same name by Eudoxus (366 B.C.), which no longer survives. These books held the earliest descriptions of the Greek skies, and in them the constellations are already fully formed. But where did the Greek constellations come from?...