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Asterisms, Single-Sourced Constellations, and “Rebrands”

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Abstract

The 28 constellations in Volume 1 of this book are grouped together on the basis of a particular defining characteristic: each was a more or less original invention that is sourced in more than one published text or chart.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Genesis 37:9 (NIV). The “eleven stars” refer to the ancient houses of the zodiac.

  2. 2.

    E.g., Aratus, Phaenomena 146; Hyginus, Astronomica 2.24.

  3. 3.

    The War was waged between the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt and the Seleucid Empire, two successor states of Alexander the Great’s empire, during the third and second centuries bc.

  4. 4.

    The modern city of Mersin, Turkey.

  5. 5.

    In 1843 the English astronomer Sir John Herschel proposed replacing Lacaille’s invented constellation Pyxis with a fourth constituent of Argo Navis he called Malus (the Mast); Herschel’s figure appeared on a few mid-century maps but was discarded before 1900.

References

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  • Herschel, John F. W. 1843. “Farther Remarks on the Revision of the Southern Constellations”. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society of London, 6(1), 60–62.

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Barentine, J.C. (2016). Asterisms, Single-Sourced Constellations, and “Rebrands”. In: Uncharted Constellations. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27619-9_2

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