This resulted in some awkward-looking outlines.ĭelporte’s new boundaries were approved by the IAU at its General Assembly at Leiden in 1928, and the results were published in 1930 in Délimitation Scientifique des Constellations along with an accompanying Atlas Céleste. The IAU took up the suggestion and appointed Delporte to prepare official boundaries with the specific requirement that all known variable-brightness stars should remain within the constellation to which they had already been assigned. At the second IAU General Assembly held in Cambridge, England, in 1925, Eugène Delporte of the Royal Observatory in Brussels presented proposals for a clearly defined system of constellation boundaries drawn along lines of right ascension and declination, the celestial equivalents of longitude and latitude on Earth. These are the 88 IAU constellations that are still recognised today, as described in more detail below.īut these constellations still lacked officially defined boundaries, and this was the next task to be tackled. At its first General Assembly held in Rome in 1922, the IAU’s Commission on Notations and Units agreed on a list of 88 constellations covering the entire sky, with three-letter abbreviations of their Latin names. Therefore, one of the IAU’s first tasks after its formation was to define an internationally agreed set of constellations. With the high number of investigated stars, new nomenclatures emerged, many of them relying on the constellation names.
Many variable stars were discovered, stellar transients were investigated, and astrophysics with electric measurements of brightnesses and spectra of stars was developed.
In the 19th century, there were several changes in the scientific method and research focus. Bakich libraryīy the 19th century, over a hundred constellations could be found on various star charts since there was nothing to stop astronomers from inventing new figures between the existing ones, which they often did to flatter a patron or monarch. The animals seen in this procession indicate events in nature: when the constellation of the “Llama nursing its offspring” appears, llama babies are born, when Fox appears, fox babies are born, when then the constellations of the Snake and the Toad appear, it is the wet season, and so on.įigure 3: The front cover of the IAU book edition: Delporte’s Délimitation scientifique des constellations. In the case of the Inca, each season was accompanied by “dark constellations”: constellations formed from the dark clouds in the Milky Way, not from stars (Gullberg et al., 2020 e.g., Figure 1). In particular, the Chinese and the Inca both grouped their constellations according to the four seasons. Observations of the skyscape and celestial patterns have always been exchanged among people of various cultures. As we invented languages and symbols, we learned to exchange knowledge and communicate with others of our species. However, humans are also social animals and love to exchange. Several network analysis studies have shown that the stellar patterns were grouped in similar ways all over the Earth (Bucur 2021, 2022 Kemp et al., 2022). The effect of human cognition that makes us see patterns in arbitrary configurations (like clouds, mountain chains, or stars) is studied by gestalt psychology. The images interpreted by cultural groups from patterns of stars depend on the natural environment and cultural habits: only people who have seen emus can interpret such a bird in an arbitrary pattern in the sky. For the Inuit in the far north, this was the prediction of the return of the Sun for the Egyptians, it was the flood of the Nile for the Babylonians and others in the monsoon zone, it was the predominant direction of the wind and for the Aboriginal Australians, it was the emu’s breeding cycle. They developed astronomical methods for navigation in space and time, in particular, to determine their calendars: to measure equinoxes and solstices and to predict the seasonal behaviour of nature. Therefore, all cultures have long traditions of using astronomy as a tool of survival. Ancient peoples noticed that the rising and setting points of the Sun and the Moon, as well as the visibility of stars, change throughout the year. Ever since people first wandered the Earth, great significance has been given to objects seen in the sky.
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