I recently noticed that the default background for Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster” has a purple star missing and now that i noticed it, i can’t unsee it. The one towards the bottom right is barely visible so that passes.
I didn’t mean the official Ubuntu flavors, I meant 3rd party Ubuntu variants. Stuff like archiveos.org/ubuntu-satanic/ which is literally just about changing a few graphics.
Aries wasn’t even a constellation until some Greeks decided it was. They attached it to the mythical ram in the golden fleece myth. It looks a little ram-like with the full milky way behind it, but it’s not much of a constellation.
For some reason astrology bullshit has taken over the entire internet when it comes to researching star signs. The story behind the ram is mentioned (copy pasted) everywhere but fails to tell how exactly Ptolomy made the connection.
Other constellations are much older, and are actually in the shape of the thing they represent. Ptolomy wrote down his constellations about 900 years after the Babylonians split up the zodiac into the constellations we now use in the western world as well as India and the Islamic world (with the exception of a bigger constellation that was split into three). An earlier version of Babylonian astrology goes back to about 1000 BCE and still covers many of the constellations we use today, with many names coinciding with their Greek and current derivations.
100CE is still old of course, but it’s about as far removed from the origins of most other constellations as we are from the East-West Schism.
Edit: So apparently what i first wrote up can be summarized as “Asterisms are more relevant and sensible than constellations”…
original commentEspecially nowadays with light pollution it’s easy to tell which constellations make sense, the top ones in the northern sky IMO being: Cassiopeia, Ursa Major, Orion, Cygnus (really just the middle 4 stars), and Ursa Minor but mostly because that’s got Polaris in it and it’s the most important star. Also fun anecdote: When i was a kid and didn’t know any constellations other than orion, cassiopeia, and ursa major; i independently recognized the middle 4 stars of cygnus and called it the Pilot because it looks like the front view of a jet fighter, so how’s THAT for being a sensible constellation!
I’ve heard that not having access to actual dark skies free of light pollution makes it a lot harder to see/understand how people could see figures in constellations, and that extremely faint light from other stars, nebulas, etc adds to the experience. Allegedly it makes Orion’s belt easier to see. I’ve never had access to a sky dark enough to test it in person, though.
Don’t forget that pre-electicity civilisations spent a lot of time looking up at the night sky. Any traveler had to learn how to use the stars to navigate, so if course they’d group stats together to create points of reference.
Uh that one is a rare case of constellation actually look like what it’s supposed to be. It’s pretty easy to see the scorpion tail imo. Doesn’t have all the legs obviously but still close enough to consider it as one.
Also like, people tend to draw roughly the same lines, at least for asterisms.
I can’t imagine many people, regardless of culture, would look at the northern cross or the big dipper and not draw almost exactly the same lines as everyone else.
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