Constellations

Welcome to the Munich Astro Archiv Constellation Pages.

Being asked most people would name the twelve constellations of the zodiac and some more they have heard of or even seen (most common is surely the Big Dipper, though it is not a constellation but an asterism). In total there are 88 constellations, which can be divided into eight constellation families (see Menzel, "A Field Guide to the Stars and Planetes").

Many names we use nowadays came from the ancient Greeks. They used to assign their gods and heroes to certain figures in the sky. Due to their northern location they only gave names to those regions visible from their countries. The regions around the celstial souther pole got some of their names when the astronomer Johan Bayer made hos notes about the south regions of the sky. He followed the tradition of the names of the ancient. Later on the french astronomer La Caille added the last 13 to fill the star-poor regions between the existing groups. He finally broke with the traditional namegiving and used scientific equipment or instruments (there is only one exception, which is Mensa, the Table Mountain).

It should be noted that although now common this is only the western view of the star patterns.
Noone knows when mankind gave names to stars and grouping of stars. It is most likely that constellation names were invented by early sailors for navigation purposes. But also in the deserts they might have been a good help for the people to find their ways. Therefore its quite naturally that each culture grouped the stars differently and gave them names from their natural and social enviroment.

From the listing of all 88 constellations one finds links to more extended informations about each of it. This informations covers data and descriptions about stars, deepsky objects and meteor showers.
There are also tables with the brightest stars of each constellation available.

To find the constellation in the sky you might try these finder charts for different portions of the sky. A positive version (how the sky looks at night) for each part is included to these charts for easier identification.
Sometimes people find starchart pretty useless because they show only a small part of the sky. Photographic pictures of the entire sky a prepared as image maps (all images below 4 kB; clicking on an area leads to the constellation - individual stars will hopefully included soon).

The constellation pages are available in english, german and soon in italian. On each description page you find the flags of Germany and Italy which leads to the same page translated to these languages.
At the bottom of each page you find two logos: a miniature version of the MAA Logo, which gives a backlink to the MAA home page, and a miniature version of the Logo of this constellation page (in preparation; letter "C" and "S"), which simply gives you the possibilty to jump directly back to here.

References:
See here the list of the literature I used to create these pages.