In this episode of Cosmically Curious, St. Anselm College's Nicole Gugliucci explains how astronomers settled on the official list of constellations, and what the choices reveal about whose stories are represented in the night sky.
Transcript:
Patrick McNameeKing: Nicole, I know there are famous constellations named for characters in Greek mythology, but I recently read about some real duds.
Is it true that there's a constellation of a desk?
Nicole Gugliucci: Yeah.
So Oficina Typographica was literally a constellation of a print shop, kind of squished in between the star Sirius in Canis Major, kind of next to that, where there's no other currently recognized major constellation.
And so people would create these maps to honor certain discoveries or certain people or certain things of interest.
Patrick McNameeKing: Any other notable flops?
Nicole Gugliucci: A lot of them are devices from the 17th and 18th century, like Telescopium and things like that.
So you really see in that list of what we consider the official constellations, the bias towards which things were chosen to officially represent.
Patrick McNameeKing: So how did we get an official list of constellations?
Nicole Gugliucci: In the early 20th century, the International Astronomical Union set aside 88 constellations that were the official constellations across the northern and southern hemispheres, and that breaks up the whole sky into 88 regions where that constellation is. So any point in the sky is part of some region.
Patrick McNameeKing: What else got left off the list?
Nicole Gugliucci: What you see in the official constellations today is a bias towards a Western culture, both in the Northern Hemisphere, where we have adopted, again, the Greco-Roman, ancient traditional constellations. But in the Southern Hemisphere, none of the constellations from indigenous cultures in the Southern Hemisphere are included in the official list.
Patrick McNameeKing: Nicole, thank you as always.
If you have questions about the night sky, send us an email: cosmic@nhpr.org.
