Contrary to popular opinion: the old civilizations that named the stars didn't name them after animals, but people.
This isn't a animal representation of a goat. But in fact named after Steve Goat's massive dong.
Source: me, a professional astro-dickologist
Find somewhere without light pollution, and you'll see a goat
Inca astronomers in the Andean mountains saw such dark skies that they actually starting identifying and naming the dark spots of the Milky Way.
Personally I spent a couple of winters in the far northern wilderness in northern Ontario ... way up close to Hudson Bay. Hundreds of miles away from strong light pollution on a cold February night was the closest I ever felt to being in space ... the cold clear night sky is so brilliant, there are stars all the way down to the horizon and you literally feel like standing on the edge of the planet.
I really want to feel that at least just once
Aboriginal Australians also had 'constellations' that were the dark spots in the sky as opposed to the stars. I didn't know some Inca did that as well.
I know this may or may not be commonly known. But the lines or stick figures drawn with stars that we come to associate are just a tiny part of the constellation. Sometimes called asterism. The actual constellation is the entirety of all stars that fall between the region. So it's more the cloud of stars inside the constellation. In the past it was a figure or silhouette. Modern constellations are squarish regions of sky. If you have a clear uncontaminated sky, the figures are still sorta visible to the naked eye.
I literally was wondering as I scrolled through the comments about how different the sky could have looked when constellations were named and maybe thats why they don't make as much sense now visually, and how it's weird I never thought about or considered it before. Then bam. Your comment.
astrologers?
Yes. The Greeks are literally why you have to pretend to respect people that talk about Pisces in ascendency or whatever, and their astrologers were their astronomers, they recognized the difference between observation and divination but used the terms interchangeably nonetheless.
There are some famous examples who doubtless thought the mysticism was nonsense, but it was what paid the bills so they told their patrons what they wanted to hear and then went back to their math and charts.
It's older than the Greeks. The astrologers in Mesopotamia already collected historic events as a source for predictions
The Greeks mostly copied that. If they created it, they wouldn't have used this 'goat' as the first constellation of the year that started with the spring equinox.
Do Cassiopeia now. Literally boobies.
This post is worthless without a picture of them boobies.
It's just a giant W. https://images.app.goo.gl/tB4eDwzj2K6ra21t7
✅ Featherless ❌ Biped
Well it’s not a man, could be a goat
The thing people always overlook is that some of those names were given to the shapes that were seen thousands of years ago. And since then the position of those stars as we perceive them have changed quite a bit. And if they've moved in dissimilar directions, there can be quite a substantial change in the shape we see compared to what they saw. So the older the designation of a constellation is, the more it's distorted.
