NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Constellation names
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2003 Nov 3, 09:29 +1100
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2003 Nov 3, 09:29 +1100
What I found initially confusing with celestial navigation was that the familiar names of stars were replaced with unfamiliar ones. An example: Alpha Centauri, our closest stellar neighbour, is known as Rigil Kentaurus, for reasons still unclear (to me). It is one of the two stars known as the Pointers, as they point towards the Southern Cross (Crux) and can be used with Crux to find the direction of true south. Incidentally, there is a star lying virtually directly over the South Pole, like Polaris over the North, but unfortunately it is too dim for practical purposes. More star trivia: It is difficult to comprehend the proportions of celestial distances, I like this example. If the earth was the size of a pea then the sun would be the size of a basketball, and about 46 metres away ('from the house to the street', as I explained it to our children - we have a long driveway). But the nearest star is another basketball - in Singapore ! (distance from Sydney). Though for further objects, nebulae and so on, the comparison breaks down, as the distances are still astronomical.