44
MYTHOLOGY >> LEARNING ABOUT CONSTELLATIONS
SECOND STAR TO THE RIGHT
Connecting the Dots An Exploration into the Depths of One of Space’s Greatest Treasures — Constellations W RIT TE N BY C A MERON COBB
T
he night sky. A nocturnal kaleidoscope of wonders, twisted every evening to introduce a celestial masterpiece of diverse combinations and patterns. The majority of space extending beyond the confines of our planet remains foreign and inconceivably vast, but we’re privileged with the opportunity to marvel at these evenings of darkness that blanket the sky and teem with an immeasurable number of stars just waiting for the connections imagination provides. One of the (very) many astronomical phenomena are constellations, a word that derives from Latin appropriately meaning “group of stars” or “stars together.” Constellations are clusters of the brightest
44 |
OUR TOWN MAGAZINE
MAY/JUNE 2017
stars we are able to see, said Naibí Mariñas, a lecturer in the Astronomy Department at the University of Florida. The stars that make up each constellation may appear to be close to the others that form the overall picture, but in reality, they’re incredibly far apart and spread out in multiple directions. Our minds simply transform them into 2-D displays. On a clear night, you may find that your eyes search for things such as familiar Dippers, a renowned hero’s belt, and bears both great and small, but that creativity had to stem from somewhere. The constellations as we know them in the U.S. date back to Babylonian times, Mariñas said. After Alexander the Great invaded Babylon, the concept of constellations made its way into Greece, where they integrated these dotted images with aspects of Greek mythology. Though we adopted the Greek’s