Constellations
& Mythology
in the Stars

Four journeys, four skies. What rises where you are standing, who named it, and what they said it was.

Produced by Marcos Soto
Designed by Pablo Soto

How this booklet works

Every fact carries a receipt. The small codes at the foot of each page are claim IDs — two letters for the act, then a number. Each one has a row in the research edition naming the source, its licence, and the day it was checked.

The charts answer back. Tap any star on a map and its name flips to what the name means. Reveal all names turns the whole chart over at once; Enlarge opens it full screen, where the stars still answer.

Field mode turns the page red. Red light barely touches the eye's night vision, so you can read this outside without starting your twenty minutes again.

The index filters. Tick where you are going and the booklet keeps those pages and puts the rest away. Tick the introduction or the practical pages alongside it, or neither.

Your latitude decides your sky

You are standing on a ball, and the whole sky turns once a day around one axle. Where you stand decides how that axle tilts.

At the north pole it points straight up: the stars circle overhead and nothing rises or sets. On the equator it lies flat on the horizon: everything comes up in the east, passes over your head, goes down in the west. Everywhere else is in between — and how far in between is your latitude.

One number, and it decides how much sky you will ever see.

Ninety-nine names for the same light

The official sky is younger than the aeroplane. In 1922 the International Astronomical Union settled on 88 constellations; Eugène Delporte drew their borders, approved in 1928. A constellation is now a region, so every star belongs to exactly one.

A pattern is something else: the Plough inside Ursa Major, the Summer Triangle across three constellations. Those are asterisms — what people actually see.

Most star names astronomers use came through Arabic, Greek and Latin, often Greek translated into Arabic in the Middle Ages, then into Latin.

Two sets of names

The labels below say what the old Arabic names mean — and each one names a part of the animal. Tap any star to see the name astronomers actually print on charts.

Read them together and the bear reassembles itself: back, loins, thigh, tail. The picture never left — it was hiding inside the labels.

The pole and the plough

Follow the two stars at the pan's edge — Dubhe and Merak — five times their own distance and you arrive at Polaris, the one star that barely moves. From Tromsø it sits 70° up, almost overhead.

The queen who bragged

Cassiopeia boasted that she and her daughter outshone the sea nymphs. The sea took its revenge, and the queen was fixed to the sky on a chair — turning head over heels around the pole for the rest of time.

A frozen toe, thrown north

“One of Aurvandill's toes had stuck out of the basket, and became frozen; wherefore Thor broke it off and cast it up into the heavens.”

Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda, 13th century

The Norse left an enormous mythology and almost no star names. Three survive: Aurvandill's toe, the eyes of the giant Þjazi, thrown up by Thor, and the wagon we still call the Plough.

Nobody knows which star the toe is. Rigel has been argued for, with Aurvandill as Orion himself; Sirius and Venus have also been proposed. The honest answer is that it was lost.

The summer with no stars

From April to August there is no astronomical darkness at Tromsø at all. Not dim skies — none. The aurora is up there and invisible, and so is everything else.

When the dark comes back, go out between 22:00 and 02:00, and hope for a restless sun: the equinox months carry the most geomagnetic storms.

The crossroads

On the equator both poles lie on the horizon and the whole sky wheels through, upright. Over a year nothing on our list ever fails to rise here — the Plough in one direction, the Southern Cross in the other, on the same night.

The dark is steady too: about nine and a half hours, every month, all year.

The animals made of dark

Andean sky watchers read the black between the stars. In the dust lanes of the Milky Way they name a llama nursing her calf — Yakana — stretched between Crux, Centaurus and Scorpius, with a fox at the scorpion's tail behind her.

The Coalsack, a hole of darkness beside the Southern Cross, is Yutu, the tinamou. A serpent, Mach'acuay, runs the long band; a toad, Hanp'atu, sits near the Cross.

You need a dark sky and twenty minutes of patience. Then you stop seeing stars and start seeing the shapes between them.

The cluster that forecasts rain

For four hundred years Quechua and Aymara farmers have judged the Pleiades around 24 June: sharp means rain on time, faint means plant late.

In 2000, researchers showed they were right. High cirrus, invisible from the ground, blurs the cluster — and tracks the El Niño years that dry the Andes.

The road the sun walks

The zodiac is simply the strip of sky the sun crosses in a year. From the tropics that strip passes nearly overhead, which is why it mattered so much to the people who lived under it.

Two facts spoil the horoscope. The sun crosses thirteen constellations, not twelve — every December it clips Ophiuchus, and nobody gave him a sign.

And the dates have slid. Spin a top and watch it lean: the axis swings slowly round in a cone. Earth does the same, one turn every 26,000 years. The calendar was set two thousand years ago, so the sun now sits about one constellation earlier than your birthday claims.

The ancestors' path

From the Serengeti the centre of our galaxy climbs 63° above the horizon — a bar of light thick enough to cast the faintest shadow. In several East African traditions it is a path the ancestors walk; one recorded name calls it the night's backbone.

The hunter and the scorpion

The Greeks set them at opposite ends of the sky: the scorpion that killed Orion rises as the hunter sets, so the two never share the night. From the equator you get both at full height, six months apart, standing straight up rather than leaning.

Look at the colours: Betelgeuse in Orion's shoulder and Antares in the scorpion's heart are both red, both enormous and cool, and both genuinely unsteady — they swell and fade over months. That is why they beat more slowly here.

Kilimia, the digging stars

In Kiswahili the Pleiades are Kilimia: the ploughing stars, the digging stars. The same idea runs down the continent — isiLimela in Xhosa and Zulu, Selemela in Sotho and Tswana, Shirimela in Tsonga. A cluster that tells you when to break ground.

Among the Maasai, Kileken is the morning star — Venus — and the orphan boy who herded cattle before dawn and vanished when his secret was broken.

Four stars, two giraffes

The same four stars that Europeans called a cross are read further south as Dithutlwa, the giraffes, in Sotho, Tswana and Venda tradition. Orion's belt has been recorded as three pigs, as zebras, and among the Maasai as three old men pursued by widows.

This is the point of the booklet in one page: the sky does not come with captions. Every figure in it was somebody's idea, and most of the ideas were not Greek.

Finding south without a pole star

There is no southern Polaris. Run the long axis of the Cross four and a half times, then drop straight down: that point is south. Alpha Centauri and Hadar, alongside, keep you honest. In Mapuche the Cross is Melipal: four stars.

A rhea, a llama, a sky you belong to

Where the Andes see a llama in the dark clouds, Tupi-Guaraní peoples see Guyra Nhandu, the rhea: the Coalsack is its head, Alpha and Beta Centauri the eggs it swallowed. Complete in the evening sky in late June, it marks the turn of the season. Should the Cross let its head go, the bird would drink all the water in the world.

Further south the Mapuche call the Pleiades Ngaw — the potatoes — and their June rising helps set We Tripantü, the new year.

For the Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego each person belonged to a shó'on, a sky. Long called extinct, they were legally recognized again by Chile in October 2023.

The sky you are born into

The Selk'nam divided Tierra del Fuego into hunting territories — haruwen — and gave each one to a sky. There were four, named for the cardinal directions. The word was shó'on: sky.

You belonged to your father's sky, and you could not marry inside it. It was not only where you lived. When you died, those who mourned you sang the lament of your sky — and it was to that sky that you went.

Above the four was Témaukel — the source of everything and no kind of figure at all: not a man, not a face, an idea.

The sky that refuses to set

The Antarctic season runs November to March — precisely the months with no astronomical darkness at 65° south. Two galaxies hang overhead, the Magellanic Clouds, and for most of the season you cannot see them.

Late February and March give the sky back. That is when the Cross returns, almost vertical.

Give it twenty minutes

Your eyes need twenty to thirty minutes in the dark before they work properly at night. One glance at a white phone screen undoes it, and you start again.

So: red light only — that is what field mode is for. Find a spot with the horizon open in the direction you want. Sit or lie back, because a sky held above your head is easier than a sky at the end of your neck. Then wait, and watch stars you could not see at first begin to arrive.

Look slightly to the side of a faint object and it brightens. The edge of your eye sees dim light better than the centre does.

What to take out with you

A red light. Not a head torch on its lowest setting — a red one. Red cellophane, red tape or even a red sweet wrapper over an ordinary torch will do it. White light costs you the twenty minutes you just spent.

More clothing than you think. You stop moving when you start looking, and the cold arrives about ten minutes later. Whatever you would wear to walk, add a layer to it.

Something to lean back on. A folding chair, a mat, a coat on the ground. A sky held above your head is easier than a sky at the end of your neck, and you will stay out twice as long.

Binoculars, not a telescope. Nearly everything in this booklet — the Pleiades, the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds — is wide, and a telescope shows you too little of it at once. Water, too; you will be out longer than you planned.

The moon decides

Nothing in this booklet competes with a full moon. It washes out the Milky Way completely and leaves only the brightest few dozen stars — the dark shapes, the Coalsack, the llama and the rhea all disappear.

The rule is simple. The best nights are around the new moon, or any night before the moon rises or after it sets. A half moon low in the west still leaves you a good second half of the night.

Before a trip, check two numbers for your dates: the moon's phase, and the time it rises and sets. They decide more than the weather does.

Five minutes before you go

A phone will photograph the night sky. It will not do it the way it photographs everything else, and it will not do it on a first attempt in the dark. Five minutes indoors, while you still have light, is most of the difference.

Find your night mode. On an iPhone 11 or later it arrives by itself when the light drops — a moon symbol, with a number of seconds beside it. On a Pixel, Night Sight does the same. On a Galaxy you choose it yourself: More, then Night. Find out which of those is yours in a dark corner of a room, not on a dark deck.

Turn the flash off and leave it off. It lights the air in front of you and nothing in the sky. Every night mode is built to work without it.

Find the timer and set it to three seconds. If your finger is on the phone when the shutter fires, you have moved the phone.

Stay at 1×. Not the 0.5× wide lens, and not zoomed in — zooming in the dark only crops a dim picture smaller. On a Pixel, leave the astrophotography setting alone as well: it is not a handheld mode, and choosing it starts a timer for you to put the phone down and walk back.

Practise locking the focus. Press and hold on the screen and wait for the camera to stop hunting. There is nothing out there for it to focus on, and left alone it will search all night.

Photographing it with a phone

1. Flash off. Night mode on.
2. Get low. Lie back, kneel, or lock both elbows in.
3. Press and hold the sky to lock the focus.
4. Leave the length where the phone put it — do not drag it to Max.
5. Three-second timer. Breathe out, and hold until it finishes.
6. Take five. Handheld, you are keeping one of them.

Your phone does not take one long photograph. It takes a burst and adds them together — a Galaxy stacks thirty — so the picture is built over several seconds, and the phone has to be still for all of them. You will be holding it, so the trick is not to hold steadier. Nobody can. It is to stop holding with your arms and start resting on your bones. Google's handheld instruction is exactly that plain: hold still for a few seconds while your device captures the photo.

Afloat, expect less. On a ship or a Zodiac the deck is moving and your elbows move with it, so no position saves you. Keep the capture short, take more of them, and expect the bright stars rather than the Milky Way. Much of the Antarctic and Galápagos sky happens on water.

Give the sky time to arrive, too. Forty-five to ninety minutes after sunset is when it is worth starting — and on some of these coasts there is no night at all to photograph: none at Tromsø from April to August (page ), none on the Peninsula from November to February (page ). The moon decides the rest (page ).

One thing worth knowing. A camera screen at full brightness undoes the twenty minutes your eyes spent getting dark-adapted, and it does it in seconds (page ). That is a real cost, not a reason to put the phone away. Photograph first, or photograph last, and give your eyes the rest of the night.

What the numbers mean

Astronomical darkness

Hours with the sun more than 18° below the horizon — the light still scattered overhead is then fainter than the starlight. Real dark, not dusk.

Altitude

Height in degrees: 0° horizon, 90° overhead. Your fist at arm's length is about 10°, so 60° is six fists up.

Colour

How hot it is, and nothing else. Heat a poker: dull red, orange, white, blue-white. Blue Rigel runs near 12,000°C; red Antares about 3,400°C.

Circumpolar

Circles the pole and never sets. From Ushuaia, the Southern Cross; from Tromsø, the Plough.

Peak months

When a constellation stands highest around nine in the evening.

Heliacal rising

The first dawn a star reappears after weeks lost in the sun's glare. Many calendars turn on it.

Kp

Geomagnetic activity, 0 to 9. Low keeps the aurora near the pole; from about 6 it brightens and reaches far south.

Say it out loud

These names belong to living languages. The spellings below are rough guides for English speakers — if you meet someone who speaks one, ask; they will tell you better than a book can.

Leading a group tonight

Five things that work with a group standing in the cold:

Point first, name second. Find the shape together, then give it its names — all of them. A name lands once people see what it is attached to.

Start with the brightest thing up. Orion, the Cross, Jupiter. Faint things come after eyes adjust.

One story, told properly. Three myths rushed is worse than one told slowly. Save the rest for tomorrow night.

Show them the dark. The llama and the rhea are what people remember — nobody has told them to look at the black instead of the light.

End by finding south, or north. A guest who can find it alone the next night keeps it.

When to look up

Red on black, for reading outside without losing your night eyes. Months below are for the comfortable hour, around nine in the evening.

Showing this region only — clear the filter to see all eight

Sources & credits

Every statement carries a claim ID and a source in our ledger — 70 entries, each with its license and the date checked. Sky figures are computed per latitude, not quoted; star names follow the IAU catalogue.

IAU · NOAA · NASA · ESO · Orlove, Chiang & Cane, Nature 403 (2000) · Urton (1981) · Centre for Astronomical Heritage · Afonso (2006) · Fu (2016) · Giménez Benítez. Full citations in the research edition.