One thing I’ve learned over many decades of stargazing is this: Stare at the stars long enough and you’ll begin to find among them all kinds of recognizable patterns.
Lions and tigers and bears depicted in constellation maps, however, may forever elude you, but there’s no law against creating your own star groupings.
Unlike constellations, which are 88 recognized areas of the sky, these patterns we can create are called “asterisms,” outlines that actually look like something familiar.
I often suggest to my Borrego Night Sky Tour guests to look for geometric figures, letters of the alphabet, numbers and even simple everyday items such as a dipper or a teapot.
You’d be surprised just how many you can find once you begin looking.
One of my favorite letter asterisms appears low in the northeastern sky after dark this time of year. Its name is Cassiopeia.
This region of the sky was known to the ancient Greeks as an Ethiopian queen, and mother of Andromeda.
She was said to have been so obsessed with her own beauty that when the gods placed her in the heavens, they put her in the north so she’d revolve daily about the North Celestial Pole and spend half of her time upside down.
The ancient Persians, however, represented its stars as a kneeling camel, while some in the Inuit culture of Canada and Greenland knew it as Pituaq, a lampstand.
Some see the stars of this region as the throne on which the Queen sits.
If you can see these things (without chemical assistance, of course), good for you. Maybe I don’t have much imagination, but to me, Cassiopeia appears simply as the letter “W.”
This is how it appears right now, of course, but over an entire year Cassiopeia revolves around the North Star, and it appears to rotate.
Pay attention and you’ll discover it can appear as four different figures.
Now it appears as a “W,” but when it’s on its side it can look like an “E” or even a “3.” And when it’s high above the North Star, it appears as an “M.”
On August nights, look just above Cassiopeia for another “W.” It appears almost like a miniature version (with a few extra stars), but it’s part of the constellation Lacerta, the lizard.
You’ll need a dark moonless sky to see it since it contains no especially bright stars, so it’ll be best to wait until later this week when the moon is no longer in the evening sky.
Lacerta is one of seven obscure Northern Hemisphere star groupings created and introduced in 1687 by the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius.
He designed Lacerta to use the stars of such a tiny area of the sky that no other constellation would fit it.
Some think he may have been inspired by the ancient Chinese, who represented this celestial region as a Flying Serpent.
If you’ve got a good dark sky later this week, you should be able to trace the outline of a lizard.
But the five stars on its far left-hand side … well, they seem to form a figure I just call Cassiopeia-Lite!
