This is an example
of the unhelpful sky charts generally used in the astronomy columns of newspapers and popular magazines.
It’s from yesterday’s Guardian. The article says that Capricornus is an important constellation because part of the ancient zodiac, but is inconspicuous, and you can at present use Jupiter and Saturn as pointers to it.
Fair enough. And you, sage reader, can with effort decipher the chart because you know the sky. But if you were a beginner, could you use this maze of dots and lines to find anything as you gaze at the sky? I don’t think so.
I think the way of connecting dots is derived from H.A. Rey’s ingenious but doomed method. It tries to make Capricornus look like a goat. But Capricornus doesn’t look like a goat; it looks like a boat.
The picture is supposed to be part of the sky as you look southward at midnight. I hope my way of rendering this is more helpful.
What do you think? Should the constellation formlines be fainter? Should the stars that mark points in them be brighter?
__________
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Curious reference to “H.A. Rey’s ingenious but doomed method as described in his book … .” I have the hardcover 1966 edition of the book (a Christmas gift that year) and and agree, then and now, that Rey’s method is ingenious.
But I must have missed the memo about it being “doomed.” Can Guy, or anyone else here, shed some light on that?
Rey introduced people to the stars with the same good humor as in his “Curious George” stories. But his method of connecting non-adjacent faint stars into forced constellation pictures was doomed to unworkability. People will have had to struggle to find Capricornus in spite of, rather than with the help of, his picture.
The current xkcd comic is right in line with this… https://xkcd.com/2356/
We’re getting lazy, expecting all knowledge to flow into our craniums instantaneously and effortlessly. Typing just a few characters into a search box prompts a certain famous search engine to start applying its artificial cleverness to everything it already knows about me to suggest a half dozen questions I might be asking. Clicking on one of those questions makes a little box with an answer, technically correct but completely decontextualized, pop up on my screen. Voila, I have the pleasant sensation that I have learned something. No need to spend all the time and effort to click on a link and read a web page.
It takes a couple years of diligent skywatching to get a firm grasp on the bright stars and major constellations, where they are in the sky in relation to one another at different times of night and during which seasons, and how they move across the sky as seen from your latitude. Once you’ve got the framework you can start filling in the fainter stars and less obvious constellations. Star charts are an invaluable aid in this learning process, but until you recognize Sagittarius, Fomalhaut, and the great square of Pegasus as familiar friends, identifying Capricornus will be a challenge better put off until next year.
That said, Capricornus looks to me more like a boat than a goat. I think it would be helpful to include pips of the third and fourth magnitude stars that outline the hull and deck (this raises another complication — if your observing sight is even moderately light polluted, none of these stars are obvious to the naked eye! Putting together a mental mosaic of a constellation using binoculars is different than lying back and gazing out into a dark star-filled sky.). Alpha and Beta deserve to be depicted because they are easy and interesting double stars.
I see all this as you do. The programming challenge is to have the option of showing all the stars that serve (for me) as nodes in my constellation formlines, some of them being dimmer than some stars that do not; and to show them not too bright, but bright enough to be discernible in the formlines; which is interlaced with the problem of showing the formlines at modest distinctness from the sky background, whose brightness and color I make to vary with altitude, time of night, Milky Way, and moonshine; also interlaced with keeping options to show only the formlines I choose to be “main” ones; and options of sometimes showing simpler maps with no formlines, or main formlines only, or all stars to a certain magnitude; etc.
I did a bout of work on this a few weeks ago, but I evidently need to do another.
I don’t know whether the “newspaper” charts use a database file or selections from an all-celestial-sphere picture (which would have difficulties). They could probably not adopt my curing lines, because those are made (simulating my former freehand drawings) with Bezier curves, a technique I stumbled on; the math under it is a mystery to me; it rquires (the way I do it) a file with, for every connecting line, four trial-and-error-chosen numbers to control its double curvature.
Wow. So many complex choices go into making a picture that looks like a spontaneous sketch.
It’s a very obscure constellation but does contain the globular cluster m30 which I always find quite easy to see even in my 8×25 monocular.
When I was 13, we had a visit from my stargazing cousin and he got me started on an interest that has lasted nearly 70 years. The following June, my mother gave me H.A. Rey’s book for my birthday and I taught myself the constellations that summer. Yes, it’s possible to teach yourself even the summer constellations from that book–Leo and Scorpio are unmistakable, and I loved Virgo lounging around on her couch–although life gets much easier when you have Orion in the sky. Whatever you think of H.A. Rey, he was accessible to a teenaged beginner, and started me on a lifetime of enjoyment of the sky. On a clear night, I’m always at home if I can look up.
Marcia Barr
Thank you for raising the issue of how poorly the night sky is often presented to the public!
The Guardian constellation lines are not, as it happens, those of H.A. Rey, who pulled in several even fainter stars (!) to give the little goat a polygon body instead of simply a stick-figure line:
https://sp8cebit.com/portfolio/8bit-constellations-capricorn/
Looking at the constellation lines collection in Stellarium (which has the most comprehensive such list that I have seen so far), the figure in the Guardian is from the figures called simply the “Western” constellation lines. I am not sure where they got them; I don’t see a comment in the code naming the particular source, and the list of references is rather long.
https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/blob/master/skycultures/western/reference.fab
Of the other lines in Stellarium: the “Sky & Telescope” outline matches yours, making a bowl or dish; H.A. Rey has the goat with the polygon body; and the Czech outlines are a variation of yours, with the “tail” of the goat sticking out like the handle of the shallow bowl.
The very great strength of yours, to my eye, is the presence of the horizon. The “South” and “West” points giving some idea of scale, so that it’s clear that the view spans a full 90° (whereas the naive reader has no idea of how large an area of the sky is covered by the Guardian star chart). You add a nice sense of motion with the arrow. And the faint blues bring even more information, emphasizing again the horizon and also the galactic plane.
But to answer your question: I am not sure, were I unfamiliar with the night sky, that I would know where the actual stars are in your diagram. It’s very good for folks already familiar with the shapes. But where, for example, might the naive viewer expect to see stars along the graceful swooping curves of Ophiuchus? Even knowing where they are, I can hardly find them myself, even with the image at full size.
So my guess would be that readers would be even better served were you to bring the stars prominently into the foreground, and bumping back the constellation lines into the background a bit to merely suggest how they eye will hopefully bring the stars together into shapes in the night sky. It will, after all, be the stars alone that the viewer sees out-of-doors, whose positions are crucial to understanding how the scene will look in life.
Thank you, I shall work some more on this!
For sure, the Guardian chart is very misleading, firstly because they seemed to use the same size symbols for all the stars. In their chart, Altair and the stars of Equuleus are the same size :) Fomalhaut is not even identified, but surely it would be one of the first stars to draw people’s attention when looking at this part of the sky. In your chart, which is a dramatic improvement, my preference would be to see the stars a bit more prominently and the constellation lines as straight segments between naked eye stars. I agree with you that attempting to make the patterns look like the objects they are supposed to be results in an overdone drawing. I grew up in the early 1970’s with the S&T charts by George Lovi, and I still think of the constellation patterns in that way: the lines are only there to help you connect the stars that belong to a particular constellation together, not draw a realistic-looking picture.
Good point. Capricornus is definitely inconspicuous and a beginner will likely have trouble spotting it.To do so, It takes a dark sky and plenty of patience to scan the outline of the constellation. I like pointing out alpha and beta in binoculars. They take a minute or so to find, but are easy to split. Just to the northeast of Saturn…
Your charts are light years ahead of the other chart. The stars in your Astronomical Calendar charts are easier to see than on your computer charts but it doesn’t matter because when I study the night sky I still use the Astronomical Calendar.