Playing on Stellarium today. Free! And fair - like an innocent maiden holding a stalk of grain. As opposed to the fish swimming under the deep waters. One is up, the other is down. That's the Galactic way. The Galactic order of things.
What we call the zodiac sign Virgo is actually in the constellation Leo. We're getting into the precession of equinoxes here, but don't freak and click away! The precession of equinoxes is your friend. With the magic of Stellarium it will take you on a thrilling carnival ride into past and future millennia. You can get a view of the sky people were observing when they built those architectural wonders 6 thousand years ago.
But for today we'll just mention the big bad precession and give it a heart and thumbs up. Before we bring it out on stage we need to introduce our very own galaxy, the redundantly named Milky Way. I put our galactic grid up in these two images from Stellarium. The galactic grid is especially helpful because compared to, say the celestial equator, it doesn't move around much in a hundred or so human life spans. Framing our solar system against the background of the galactic equator is like building our understanding of the sky on rock instead of sand.
Following up on yesterday's charts for Mercury's superior conjunction, I have a pair of screenshots from Stellarium; the top one is for this morning in Raleigh and the bottom one is for the same time in Istanbul. (Not exactly, but only a few minutes later).
The atmosphere is 'turned off' to keep the Sun's light from blocking out the stars. Mercury is the little dot just above the Sun, and they are both just to the left of Regulus, also known as alpha Leonis. (A little preview of our upcoming interview with the notorious equinox precession; back in the days when scribes were copying the Epic of Gilgamesh on clay tablets, the late summer Sun would have been against the background of the constellation Virgo instead Leo. A bit dizzying, I know, but that can be kind of fun once you're accustomed to the funhouse clover leaf highway overlapping cycles of our solar system. You get to actually liking the apparent chaos of our little hood and appreciating the relative stability of the distant stars especially along the equator of the Milky Way.)
Back to free and fair. Stellarium is free downloadable software. And fair refers to the young maiden holding the stalk in the zodiac sign Virgo. In the fall the stalk grows up out of the ground. Here's the real deal; the seasonal sky changes over the millenia, but the constellation Virgo is always in the upper dome of the Milky Way. The opposing Pisces constellation is in the bottom dome of the Milky Way. Crazy huh? Incredible. Unless you're familiar with the galactic coordinate system, which is relatively new, around 1958. There was a lot of fiddling over many centuries leading up to the grid we use now. Back in the days of Pythagoras and Plato things were a bit more poetic than the current grid, but we've still got the names of the constellations along the river of milk, like the swan and the swift ship; then above, the bear and the maiden holding a stalk of grain and below the fishes and underworld dramatis personae, so I like to think we've got the best of both worlds, or ages.
Getting to know the order of the constellations in the galaxy makes the stories from old times a lot more fun. Some of these fantastic adventures are great winks at what part of the galaxy a person on Earth is actually facing when they look 'up' into heaven. In other words when we think we are looking 'up' at Pisces we are actually gazing into the lower depths of our galaxy.
In the first of today's digital views of heaven, the people in Raleigh have the galactic equator right in the middle of the sky. The constellation Orion, with the stars Betelgeuse and Rigel labeled, is just under the line of the galactic equator. Around the same time in Istanbul they are about to face another part of the galactic river surrounding us (like a snake eating its tail. Sound familiar?) The inside of the galaxy marked by the steam coming from the Teapot is just coming up in Istanbul's eastern sky. More obvious is Antares, or alpha Scorpius, just above the galactic equator on the left side of the screenshot. That means when we go from the constellation Scorpio to the constellation Sagittarius, we are facing first above, then below the galactic equator.
A bit of repetition like a chorus of angels is ok once in awhile, especially if we include an image. Here's one last screenshot from Stellarium showing Scorpio, Sagittarius and the galactic equator going right between them.
 |
| When we go from the constellation Scorpio to the constellation Sagittarìus, we go from facing above to facing below the galactic equator. |
Well, it's time for this old maid (more like crone, or Demeter) to sign off. I hope there aren't too many booboos in this post because I'm about to hit the publish button.
