CONSTELLATION

in astronomy, any of certain groupings of stars that were imaginedat least by those who named themto form conspicuous configurations of objects or creatures in the sky. Constellations are useful in tracking artificial satellites and in assisting astronomers and navigators to locate certain stars. From the earliest times the star groups known as constellations, the smaller groups (parts of constellations) known as asterisms, and, also, individual stars have received names connoting some meteorological phenomena or symbolizing religious or mythological beliefs. At one time it was held that the constellation names and myths were of Greek origin; this view has now been disproved, and an examination of the Hellenic myths associated with the stars and star groups in the light of the records revealed by the deciphering of Euphratean cuneiforms leads to the conclusion that in many, if not all, cases the Greek myth has a Euphratean parallel. It is thus probable that the Greek constellation system and the cognate legends are primarily of Semitic or even pre-Semitic origin and that they came to the Greeks through the Phoenicians. Thales, the earliest Greek astronomer of any note, was of Phoenician descent, and, according to Callimachus, he taught the Greeks many astronomical observations. But his writings are lost, as is also the case with those of Phocus the Samian and the history of astronomy by Eudemos of Rhodes, the pupil of Aristotle; hence, there is a paucity of present-day knowledge of Thales' astronomical learning. The earliest Greek work that purported to treat the constellations as constellations, of which there is certain knowledge, is the Phainomena of Eudoxus of Cnidus. The original is lost, but a versification by Aratus, a poet at the court of Antigonus II Gonatas, king of Macedonia, is extant, as is a commentary by Hipparchus. Three hundred years after Hipparchus, the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy adopted a very similar scheme in his uranometria, which appears in the seventh and eighth books of his Almagest, the catalog being styled the accepted version. The names and orientation of the 48 constellations therein adopted are, with but few exceptions, identical with those used at the present time. The majority of the remaining 40 constellations that are now accepted were added by European astronomers in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 20th century the delineation of precise boundaries for all the 88 constellations was undertaken by a committee of the International Astronomical Union. By 1930 it was possible to assign any star to a constellation.