Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Activity 1:
Star Patterns
Summary:
… as an old
couple, keeping
watch over the
members of
their tribe ...
… and the Milky Way
as a river carrying the
dead to their final
resting place.
Modern
astronomers still
use star groupings,
called
constellations, to
identify regions of
the sky.
(not to scale!)
Our modern system of 88 constellations is based
partly on constellations first labelled in Mesopotamia,
Babylon, Egypt and Greece, and partly on
constellations added to fill in the southern sky (plus
regions of the northern sky previously neglected
because they contain no bright stars.)
Constellation Lines:
Leo Cancer
We can describe the angular position of an object in the
sky by its altitude above the horizon (alt)
and by its angular distance from the northmost point
on our horizon, i.e. its azimuth (az),
For
example: alt
az
horizon
north west north north east
The Sun
The Earth
(b) The Zodiac
Most people think of the zodiac when constellations are
mentioned. There are only 13*constellations in the zodiac,
out of a total of 88:
Capricornus, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini,
Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpius, Ophiuchus &
Sagittarius.
Gemini
East Cancer West
Aries
Leo
Ophiuchus
Taurus
Pisces
Virgo Zodiac
Libra
band
Aquarius
Capricornus
Scorpius
Sagittarius
path of the
Sun through
the sky
Many great thinkers over the centuries have worked
to piece together a clear picture of how the apparent
movements of the Sun, constellations and planets in
the sky relate to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
The following animations might help relate the zodiacal
constellations to the way the Earth orbits the Sun each year.
Aquarius
Capricornus
Scorpius
Sagittarius
Ecliptic Zodiac
band
Mercury Mars
Venus
Earth
In the next Activity we will investigate the origin of
the seasons on Earth, the Earth’s precession, and
measuring angles and positions on the sky.
Image Credits