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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Rafael C. Caruso
Date: 2024 Aug 29, 06:12 -0700
Robin S:
Thank you for pointing out that the group of stars I misidentified as the Southern Cross “is actually the asterism in Carina known as the False Cross”, and showing me how to differentiate them. It’s always a pleasure to learn something new. I was confident about concluding that the rocket launch image was taken in the Southern hemisphere, after I realized how to interpret Frank's hint. However, I wasn't at all confident about my identification of the stars in the image. Learning to recognize constellations and asterisms is an interesting pattern recognition task, analogous to face recognition, which I find easier to do after seeing them in the sky, rather than only in a star chart. From my 40° N latitude, I’m unable to see the Southern Cross, or three of the ten brightest stars in the sky: Canopus, alpha Centauri, and Achernar.
However, I should have noticed the absence of a fifth star (ε Crucis), clearly visible in the depiction of the Southern Cross in my star map, as a distinguishing feature of the False Cross. Interestingly enough, I now see that ε Crucis is depicted in the flag of your neighbors across the Tasman Sea, but not in the New Zealand flag. Also, I hadn’t noticed until now that in both flags, β Crucis and δ Crucis aren’t on the same horizontal coordinate, but in their approximate position in the constellation. Sometimes one looks without seeing ...
Best regards, Rafael C
