Sunburst Six: The 88 Constellations - Introduction

Introducing a new series, Sunburst Six. A new astronomy lesson will be posted every Monday.

Sunburst Six: Astronomy Core
Section One: The 88 Constellations

Introduction

Up until the 1700s, it was commonly believed that the earth was the center of creation and that the sun, planets and other heavenly bodies revolved around us. A few natural philosophers (what we now call scientists) proposed that it was the sun that was actually the center of the “solar system” – but those theories were either scoffed at by other scientists, or declared heresy by religious authorities.

Whether the earth revolved around the sun or the sun around the earth made no difference to Sherlock Holmes, and it made no difference to those folks who gazed up at the stars and saw in them patterns – groupings that we now call constellations. Folks on every continent saw different patterns and attributed different legends to how they came to be. (They also used them as a guide to the seasons, and those in the Northern hemisphere used Polaris, the North Star, as a navigation tool.)

Claudius Ptolemy, a Greek-Roman citizen of Egypt who lived and died in the city of Alexandria (circa 90 AD - circa 168 AD), was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer and astrologer. He wrote a book, which we now call the Almagest, in which he discussed all of the Greek astronomical knowledge of the day. Among several other sections in the book was a section that discussed the 48 constellations that Greek star-gazers had observed.

In the 1600s and 1700s, as Old World explorers sailed from the Northern hemisphere to the Southern hemisphere, stars were seen that had never been seen before, and in the mind’s eye of these explorers, 40 more constellations were seen.

In 1922, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially divided the night skies of the world into 88 sections, and all of the (visible) stars in each section were assigned to one or another of 88 constellations.

There are 3,000 visible stars in the sky (different ones in each hemisphere – depending upon where one is in that hemisphere). Not all of them have names – but the most prominent of them do.

In this section, you will learn the name of and information about each of the prominent stars in these constellations.

(Never forget that each of these stars is a sun, the center of a solar system (albeit with a planet or planets that very likely do not possess intelligent life)). In Section Two, we will study our sun, Sol, and from it, extrapolate information about other suns.)