Celestial speciality: Giving constellations a personal touch
People the world over see patterns in the stars, just as people see faces in clouds, human forms in tree trunks, monsters in shadows, or the Virgin Mary in a stain on a wall. We are built to over-interpret what we see. There's a word for it: pareidolia, seeing meaningful images in meaningless patterns.
There's a good evolutionary reason for this. For millions of years, it was much better to mistake a pattern of shadows in the woods for a crouching tiger than to mistake a tiger for a pattern of shadows. Your ancestors whose eyes and brains erred on the side of caution lived longer, so you carry their genes. This is why your kids see a heap of clothes in the dark as a monster -- and why the starry sky became full of animals and heroes, serpents and dippers.
Shining in the eastern sky these June evenings is the bright star Vega, the highlight of the little constellation Lyra, the Lyre. Like most of our best-known constellations, it comes from ancient Greece and Babylonia. The ancients called it a vulture before they changed their minds and made it a musical instrument.
Below Vega is the Northern Cross, lying on its side, part of the constellation
The head of Draco, the Dragon, looks down toward Vega from the upper left. The Dragon is also ancient, but its head bears a more recent name, the Lozenge. Some unknown person coined this name a century or two ago, perhaps while taking cough drops.
The Big Dipper is another recent invention. It originated in the 19th century, as far as anyone can tell; before that it was the Plow or Charles's Wagon in the English-speaking world. Vega, Deneb, and
What sky patterns can you invent yourself? We don't get many stars to play with when looking through the light pollution near Boston. But try anyway. If you can get away to a darker, more natural sky, you'll have better material.
And you'll have plenty of company. Sky mappers have filled the gaps between the traditional ancient constellations with no end of their own inventions. Some of these have entered the official astronomical canon; many have not. To the 17th-century German astronomer Jakob Bartsch, we owe Monoceros, the Unicorn, and Camelopardalis, the Giraffe. There have been nationalist and political constellations, such as the Scepter of Brandenburg, the Harp of King George, and Robur Carolinum, Charles' Oak, invented by Edmond Halley of comet fame to commemorate the tree in which his king, Charles II, hid from the Cromwellian army.
The French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille filled empty spots in the southern sky with Fornax Chemica, the Chemist's Furnace, Antlia, the Air Pump, Microscopium, Telescopium, and a clutter of other junk that might have come from the attic of an 18th-century university.
In 1930 the International Astronomical Union called a halt to this confusion. It settled on 88 official constellations and assigned them exact borders filling up the entire sky. Banished to the celestial trash heap were the likes of Lumbricus, the Earthworm, Officina Typographica, the Print Shop, and Machina Electrica, the Generator. I don't miss Limax, the Slug, or Hirudo, the Leech. But it's too bad we lost Felis, the Cat, dimly glowing low in the south on late-spring evenings, considering that the official list includes three dog constellations: the Big Dog, Little Dog, and Hunting Dogs.
But unofficial patterns keep getting named just for fun. Binoculars and telescopes opened up new realms; the Leaping Minnow, the Star Gate, and the Broken Engagement Ring are widely known among amateur astronomers. Get familiar with the stars, and you too can make them truly your own.
