If you’ve been following my column for a while, you know that there are many kinds of constellations in the sky.
You also know that most of these look nothing like their namesakes but are simply celestial representations of objects, animals and people.
We in the Western Hemisphere know of 88 constellations distributed around the heavens, passed down to us by ancient skywatchers.
Represented among the stars are objects that include a crown, a microscope, a furnace and an air pump, as well as a few people such as a sculptor, an archer, a queen and a herdsman.
Also appearing there are quite a few animals, including two bears, a lion, a scorpion, a whale, a toucan — even a housefly, for heaven’s sake!
But some of these figures are pure fantasy; for example, a unicorn, a centaur and a winged horse.
One of my favorites of these is Draco, the dragon, known throughout the ancient world as a variety of mythical creatures.
Ancient Greek mythology tells that it was associated with Ladon, the dragon guarding the Golden Apples of the Hesperides — a formidable creature that Hercules had to defeat as one of his 12 Labors.
It’s not that tough to find in the sky once you locate the seven stars of the Big Dipper, high in the north just after dark this week.
If you follow the two stars at the end of the Big Dipper’s bowl downward, you’ll soon come to Polaris, the North Star.
From Polaris emerge the handle and bowl of the Little Dipper, which is smaller, fainter and inverted from its larger cousin. If you live beneath or near the lights of a large city or have bright moonlight, you may not see it at all.
It’s between these two famous dippers that the dragon winds its way across the northern sky. Look for its string of stars that begins nearly between the Big Dipper’s pointer stars and Polaris.
This end marks the tail of the dragon. Follow the string of stars downward until it snakes westward toward Polaris, where it makes another sharp turn and heads eastward once again.
At the lower end of the sinuous, dragonlike body lies a group of four stars that form the dragon’s head, but modern amateur astronomers instead refer to this shape as the “lozenge.”
The two stars at the back end of the Dipper’s bowl (closest to its handle) can be used as another pointer.
If you follow them in the same direction, you’ll soon come to a medium-bright star known as Thuban, whose name (not coincidentally) comes from an Arabic word meaning “dragon.”
While it doesn’t look like a particularly important or interesting star, Thuban certainly was a few thousand years ago.
Because of the nearly 26,000-year wobble of our Earth’s axis (known as precession), this star, and not Polaris, served as the North Star while the Egyptians were building pyramids.
If we return 21 millennia from now, we’ll notice that Polaris has again drifted away from the north celestial pole and see that Thuban has once again taken over as the North Star — a sort of “back to the celestial future.”
