Over in little_details somebody is asking what constellations are visible from Manhattan

[conuly]

The answer is, of course, none at all, but she's postulating a magical ceiling that ignores light pollution, tall buildings, and looking like a tourist.

This got me briefly looking up constellations - here on Staten Island I can reliably see three, maybe four - Cassiopeia (the w), the Big Dipper (the one everybody knows), Orion (the OTHER one everybody knows), and occasionally something else which is probably a constellation but I don't know what.

And that's about it. I understand why these stars were picked out of the sky - they must be very bright if I can see them and not others. Wikipedia has a list of former constellations up. I knew that other cultures don't always divide the sky the same way, but I didn't know you could just take a constellation and say "Well, we're not going to count this anymore, sorry". It's not like Pluto at all! Constellations have no scientific meaning, do they? They're just groups of stars that seem to make pictures due to our vantage point and perverse desire to see patterns in every random happenstance we come across.

I know it's not like the stars care, certainly, or like suddenly they move just because we don't recognize one constellation or another, but the very thought of this... I don't know, it's just weird to me.

Comments

[steorra]

The other thing about officially recognized constellations is that constellations in an official astronomical sense are different from constellations in an ordinary person's sense.

Constellations were originally, and still are in an ordinary person's sense, a group of stars that make a pattern. But in the official astronomical definition of a constellation, it's a patch of territory in the sky - probably based around some recognizable pattern of stars, but expanded in such a way that every bit of sky is part of some constellation. (I'm guessing this started first with signs of the Zodiac, where the Zodiac had to be divided up into 12 equal portions, and every part of the Zodiac had to be assigned to some sign/constellation,)

[redbird]

Quite a few stars were visible in the last big blackout, though between trees and buildings I wasn't well placed to hunt constellations. Had the building impromptu party been on the roof instead of the sidewalk, I might have.

That, of course, isn't relevant to most days. (No, I am not going to go up to the top of Inwood Hill Park, sit in the meadow, and wait for nightfall: I don't like the idea of taking some of those paths downhill in the dark, even with companions: it's falls I'm worried about, not muggers.)

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There are constellations that lots of people have known or cared about, and then there are some more artificial ones that were invented by European astronomers or explorers to divide the southern sky or fill in gaps. Maybe those are the "former" constellations.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I can't recognize most constellations, but during the summer you would see the summer triangle. (It's a triangle ... in the sky... made out of three bright dots... cleverly named too)

[siderea]

OHMEOHMEOHMEPICKME!!! *waves hand wildly in the air* Last night I was out in absolutely Nowhere, NY (upstate) at midnight, on a hill, with a new or set moon, and nothing between me and the ecliptic except a few wisps of atmosphere. It was AWESOME.

I could barely figure out what anything was because there were too many stars. But Scorpio was right above the horizon (you're going to have to move some buildings, too), and the Great Teapot of Sagittarius up and to its left. Both Dippers and Cassiopeia were highly visible. No doubt there was a summer triangle up there somewhere, but I couldn't sort it out among the hundreds of stars.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I think I was in junior high before I managed to see the Big Dipper. The stars are too far apart and too generic. Orion, Taurus, and the Pleiades are my go-to constellations, with Cassiopeia, Cygnus-maybe-Aquila, and Scorpio next up. In all cases, the pictures I have made up to fit the stars are not the pictures we were taught in Starlab. Orion has a sword, Taurus is a spaniel, and the winged thing that is either a swan or an eagle is a hawk because the swan's head is too far away from the rest of it.