Feb 7, 2020
109
24
585
Visit site
name some constellations which the readers know and have seen in the night sky ...

i for my part began in class 8 with orion or the hunter, and scanned the night skies with a torch in one hand and published maps in popular science books in the other ... it was very exciting ...

i then found the ursa major and the pole star; i saw Betelgeuse the brightest of all stars after venus the planet in the night sky ever; i knew next of Aldebaran a part of taurus ... gemini and cancer are known well :)

the orion points his weapon at taurus the bull's eye and from there you could walk in the night sky in a circle round the year to find 12 zodiac signs :) leo is awesome, virgo is excellent, libra and scorpio fine :) by then my exams were coming so i paid little attention to the next ones - sagittarius, acquaris, pieces and aries ... well actually we count the zodiac signs from aries ... but for ease of recognition we begin from orion, go to taurus and on, and end with aries ...

now one is missing in b/n i don't remember well ... there should be 12 of them if i am not wrong

apart from zodiac signs the other parts of night sky are also well charted out in the maps and they also are important - only that the sun and the moon don't walk along that path ...

among them, the big dipper is really nice, which has 7 stars which ancient india took to be the great 7 sages; alongside the last but one there is another which is very much of importance to the indian system of family ...

of everything that i did that resulted in success in spotting in the night sky what troubled me was my constant inability to find the southern equivalent of the pole star of the north - i tried hard for days but could not; then someone told me you should live in the southern hemisphere to locate then i was like oh! quite so ... i live about 18 degrees north of equator ... right understood :)

coming back to stars, how many stars and constellations can the readers make out in the modern days of high-mass lighting in the cities, and how many of us travel to rural areas to find more? there are associations in the world which strive to keep night sky dark - like this one for instance https://www.darksky.org/ - and keep sane our path to civilisation - we could only become intelligent by relating our lives to the upper heavens and understanding life on the planet :)

hope to have such associations in india too :)
 

IG2007

"Don't criticize what you can't understand..."
Yes, every night, I go up to the rooftop and see the beauty of the constellations. I have seen Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Orion, the pole star.
 

Latest posts