For tens of thousands of years, our ancestors have used the stars to foretell future events.
When people come out to view the stars at Stonehenge Aotearoa, we identify important constellations in the sky. A constellation is a group of stars forming a pattern in the sky. At first, people are often bewildered that the patterns of most constellations appear to bare very little resemblance to their name… You have to use a lot of imagination to see a bear (Ursa) or a horse (Pegasus) in the sky. Now, there is good reason for this. In the ancient world, constellations were named not for what they looked like but for their symbolism.
For example, Aquarius (the water carrier) is so called not because it looks like a man pouring water out of an urn, but because when these stars first arose in the dawn sky 5000 years ago, they heralded the onset of the rainy season. Leo (the lion) is so called because when these stars rose in the dawn 5000 years ago, it was along the Nile Valley near the hottest time of the year. At that time, the lions would come in from the wilderness and prey upon the domestic flocks. The rising of the stars was a warning… the lions are coming.
This all works because as we orbit around the Sun, we experience the same seasons in the same part of the Earth’s orbit. Consequently, every seasonal event has its own pageant of stars rising just before dawn. For example, if you were to go out and time exactly when a certain star rose or set, and then time it again from the same spot the following day, you would discover that it would rise or set four minutes earlier than it did the night before. This is due to the motion of the Earth around the Sun.
Now, our ancestors didn’t know anything about the Earth orbiting around the Sun. But what they did know was when this or that star rose, it signalled an important event.
by Richard Hall, astronomical communicator
Photo credit – Schirmer – http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1249a/