Aquarius (constellation)
Aquarius is a constellation of the zodiac, situated between Capricornus and Pisces. Its name is Latin for "water-carrier" or "cup-carrier", its symbol is, a representation of water. Aquarius is one of the oldest of the recognized constellations along the zodiac, it was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy, it remains one of the 88 modern constellations. It is found in a region called the Sea due to its profusion of constellations with watery associations such as Cetus the whale, Pisces the fish, Eridanus the river. At apparent magnitude 2.9, Beta Aquarii is the brightest star in the constellation. Aquarius is identified as GU. LA "The Great One" in the Babylonian star catalogues and represents the god Ea himself, depicted holding an overflowing vase; the Babylonian star-figure appears on entitlement stones and cylinder seals from the second millennium. It contained the winter solstice in the Early Bronze Age. In Old Babylonian astronomy, Ea was the ruler of the southernmost quarter of the Sun's path, the "Way of Ea", corresponding to the period of 45 days on either side of winter solstice.
Aquarius was associated with the destructive floods that the Babylonians experienced, thus was negatively connoted. In Ancient Egypt astronomy, Aquarius was associated with the annual flood of the Nile. In the Greek tradition, the constellation came to be represented as a single vase from which a stream poured down to Piscis Austrinus; the name in the Hindu zodiac is kumbha "water-pitcher". In Greek mythology, Aquarius is sometimes associated with Deucalion, the son of Prometheus who built a ship with his wife Pyrrha to survive an imminent flood, they sailed for nine days before washing ashore on Mount Parnassus. Aquarius is sometimes identified with beautiful Ganymede, a youth in Greek mythology and the son of Trojan king Tros, taken to Mount Olympus by Zeus to act as cup-carrier to the gods. Neighboring Aquila represents the eagle, under Zeus' command. An alternative version of the tale recounts Ganymede's kidnapping by the goddess of the dawn, motivated by her affection for young men, yet another figure associated with the water bearer is Cecrops I, a king of Athens who sacrificed water instead of wine to the gods.
In the first century, Ptolemy's Almagest established the common Western depiction of Aquarius. His water jar, an asterism itself, consists of Gamma, Pi, Zeta Aquarii; the water bearer's head is represented by 5th magnitude 25 Aquarii while his left shoulder is Beta Aquarii. In Chinese astronomy, the stream of water flowing from the Water Jar was depicted as the "Army of Yu-Lin"; the name "Yu-lin" means "feathers and forests", referring to the numerous light-footed soldiers from the northern reaches of the empire represented by these faint stars. The constellation's stars were the most numerous of any Chinese constellation, numbering 45, the majority of which were located in modern Aquarius; the celestial army was protected by the wall Leibizhen, which counted Iota, Lambda and Sigma Aquarii among its 12 stars. 88, 89, 98 Aquarii represent Fou-youe, the axes used as weapons and for hostage executions. In Aquarius is Loui-pi-tchin, the ramparts that stretch from 29 and 27 Piscium and 33 and 30 Aquarii through Phi, Lambda and Iota Aquarii to Delta, Gamma and Epsilon Capricorni.
Near the border with Cetus, the axe Fuyue was represented by three stars. Tienliecheng has a disputed position; the Water Jar asterism was seen to the ancient Chinese as Fenmu. Nearby, the emperors' mausoleum Xiuliang stood, demarcated by Kappa Aquarii and three other collinear stars. Ku and Qi, each composed of two stars, were located in the same region. Three of the Chinese lunar mansions shared their name with constellations. Nu the name for the 10th lunar mansion, was a handmaiden represented by Epsilon, Mu, 3, 4 Aquarii; the 11th lunar mansion shared its name with the constellation Xu, formed by Beta Aquarii and Alpha Equulei. Wei, the rooftop and 12th lunar mansion, was a V-shaped constellation formed by Alpha Aquarii, Theta Pegasi, Epsilon Pegasi. Despite both its prominent position on the zodiac and its large size, Aquarius has no bright stars, its four brightest stars being less than magnitude 2. However, recent research has shown that there are several stars lying within its borders that possess planetary systems.
The two brightest stars and Beta Aquarii, are luminous yellow supergiants, of spectral types G0Ib and G2Ib that were once hot blue-white B-class main sequence stars 5 to 9 times as massive as the Sun. The two are moving through space perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way. Just shading Alpha, Beta Aquarii is the brightest star in Aquarius with an apparent magnitude of 2.91. It has the proper name of Sadalsuud. Having cooled and swollen to around 50 times the Sun
Autumn
Autumn known as fall in American English and sometimes in Canadian English, is one of the four temperate seasons. Autumn marks the transition from summer to winter, in September or March, when the duration of daylight becomes noticeably shorter and the temperature cools considerably. One of its main features in temperate climates is the shedding of leaves from deciduous trees; some cultures regard the autumnal equinox as "mid-autumn", while others with a longer temperature lag treat it as the start of autumn. Meteorologists use a definition based on Gregorian calendar months, with autumn being September and November in the northern hemisphere, March and May in the southern hemisphere. In North America, autumn traditionally starts on September 21 and ends on December 21, it is considered to end with the winter solstice. Popular culture in the United States associates Labor Day, the first Monday in September, as the end of summer and the start of autumn; as daytime and nighttime temperatures decrease, trees shed their leaves.
In traditional East Asian solar term, autumn starts on or around 8 August and ends on or about 7 November. In Ireland, the autumn months according to the national meteorological service, Met Éireann, are September and November. However, according to the Irish Calendar, based on ancient Gaelic traditions, autumn lasts throughout the months of August and October, or a few days depending on tradition; the names of the months in Manx Gaelic are based on autumn covering August and October. In Argentina and New Zealand, autumn begins on 1 March and ends on 31 May; the word autumn comes from the ancient Etruscan root autu- and has within it connotations of the passing of the year. It was borrowed by the neighbouring Romans, became the Latin word autumnus. After the Roman era, the word continued to be used as the Old French word autompne or autumpne in Middle English, was normalised to the original Latin. In the Medieval period, there are rare examples of its use as early as the 12th century, but by the 16th century, it was in common use.
Before the 16th century, harvest was the term used to refer to the season, as it is common in other West Germanic languages to this day. However, as more people moved from working the land to living in towns, the word harvest lost its reference to the time of year and came to refer only to the actual activity of reaping, autumn, as well as fall, began to replace it as a reference to the season; the alternative word fall for the season traces its origins to old Germanic languages. The exact derivation is unclear, with the Old English fiæll or feallan and the Old Norse fall all being possible candidates. However, these words all have the meaning "to fall from a height" and are derived either from a common root or from each other; the term came to denote the season in 16th-century England, a contraction of Middle English expressions like "fall of the leaf" and "fall of the year". During the 17th century, English emigration to the British colonies in North America was at its peak, the new settlers took the English language with them.
While the term fall became obsolete in Britain, it became the more common term in North America. The name backend, a once common name for the season in Northern England, has today been replaced by the name autumn. Association with the transition from warm to cold weather, its related status as the season of the primary harvest, has dominated its themes and popular images. In Western cultures, personifications of autumn are pretty, well-fed females adorned with fruits and grains that ripen at this time. Many cultures feature autumnal harvest festivals the most important on their calendars. Still extant echoes of these celebrations are found in the autumn Thanksgiving holiday of the United States and Canada, the Jewish Sukkot holiday with its roots as a full-moon harvest festival of "tabernacles". There are the many North American Indian festivals tied to harvest of ripe foods gathered in the wild, the Chinese Mid-Autumn or Moon festival, many others; the predominant mood of these autumnal celebrations is a gladness for the fruits of the earth mixed with a certain melancholy linked to the imminent arrival of harsh weather.
This view is presented in English poet John Keats' poem To Autumn, where he describes the season as a time of bounteous fecundity, a time of'mellow fruitfulness'. In North America, while most foods are harvested during the autumn, foods associated with the season include pumpkins and apples, which are used to make the seasonal beverage apple cider. Autumn in poetry, has been associated with melancholia; the possibilities and opportunities of summer are gone, the chill of winter is on the horizon. Skies turn grey, the amount of usable daylight drops and many people turn inward, both physically and mentally, it has been referred to as an unhealthy season. Similar examples may be found in Irish poet William Butler Yeats' poem The Wild Swans at Coole where the maturing season that the poet observes symbolically represents his own ageing self. Like the natural world that he observes, he too has reached his prime and now must look forward to the inevitability of old age and death. French p
Celestial equator
The celestial equator is the great circle of the imaginary celestial sphere on the same plane as the equator of Earth. This plane of reference bases the equatorial coordinate system. In other words, the celestial equator is an abstract projection of the terrestrial equator into outer space. Due to Earth's axial tilt, the celestial equator is inclined by about 23.44° with respect to the ecliptic. The inclination has varied from about 22.0° to 24.5° over the past 5 million years. An observer standing on Earth's equator visualizes the celestial equator as a semicircle passing through the zenith, the point directly overhead; as the observer moves north, the celestial equator tilts towards the opposite horizon. The celestial equator is defined to be infinitely distant. At the poles, the celestial equator coincides with the astronomical horizon. At all latitudes, the celestial equator is a uniform arc or circle because the observer is only finitely far from the plane of the celestial equator, but infinitely far from the celestial equator itself.
Astronomical objects near the celestial equator appear above the horizon from most places on earth, but they culminate highest near the equator. The celestial equator passes through these constellations: These, by definition, are the most globally visible constellations. Celestial bodies other than Earth have defined celestial equators. Celestial pole Rotation around a fixed axis Celestial sphere Declination Equatorial coordinate system
Equinox
An equinox is regarded as the instant of time when the plane of Earth's equator passes through the center of the Sun. This occurs 23 September. In other words, it is the moment at which the center of the visible Sun is directly above the Equator; the word is derived from aequus and nox. On the day of an equinox and nighttime are of equal duration all over the planet, they are not equal, due to the angular size of the Sun, atmospheric refraction, the changing duration of the length of day that occurs at most latitudes around the equinoxes. Long before conceiving this equality primitive cultures noted the day when the Sun rises due East and sets due West and indeed this happens on the day closest to the astronomically defined event. In the northern hemisphere, the equinox in March is called the Spring Equinox; the dates are variable, dependent as they are on the leap year cycle. Because the Moon cause the motion of the Earth to vary from a perfect ellipse, the equinox is now defined by the Sun's more regular ecliptic longitude rather than by its declination.
The instants of the equinoxes are defined to be when the longitude of the Sun is 0° and 180°. Systematically observing the sunrise, people discovered that it occurs between two extreme locations at the horizon and noted the midpoint between the two, it was realized that this happens on a day when the durations of the day and the night are equal and the word "equinox" comes from Latin Aequus, meaning "equal", Nox, meaning "night". In the northern hemisphere, the vernal equinox conventionally marks the beginning of spring in most cultures and is considered the start of the New Year in the Assyrian calendar and the Persian calendar or Iranian calendars as Nowruz, while the autumnal equinox marks the beginning of autumn; the equinoxes are the only times. As a result, the northern and southern hemispheres are illuminated. In other words, the equinoxes are the only times when the subsolar point is on the equator, meaning that the Sun is overhead at a point on the equatorial line; the subsolar point crosses the equator moving northward at the March equinox and southward at the September equinox.
When Julius Caesar established the Julian calendar in 45 BC, he set 25 March as the date of the spring equinox. Because the Julian year is longer than the tropical year by about 11.3 minutes on average, the calendar "drifted" with respect to the two equinoxes – so that in AD 300 the spring equinox occurred on about 21 March, by AD 1500 it had drifted backwards to 11 March. This drift induced Pope Gregory XIII to create the modern Gregorian calendar; the Pope wanted to continue to conform with the edicts of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 concerning the date of Easter, which means he wanted to move the vernal equinox to the date on which it fell at that time, to maintain it at around that date in the future, which he achieved by reducing the number of leap years from 100 to 97 every 400 years. However, there remained a small residual variation in the date and time of the vernal equinox of about ±27 hours from its mean position all because the distribution of 24-hour centurial leap days causes large jumps.
This in turn raised the possibility that it could fall on 22 March, thus Easter Day might theoretically commence before the equinox. The astronomers chose the appropriate number of days to omit so that the equinox would swing from 19 to 21 March but never fall on 22 March; the dates of the equinoxes change progressively during the leap-year cycle, because the Gregorian calendar year is not commensurate with the period of the Earth's revolution about the Sun. It is only after a complete Gregorian leap-year cycle of 400 years that the seasons commence at the same time. In the 21st century the earliest March equinox will be 19 March 2096, while the latest was 21 March 2003; the earliest September equinox will be 21 September 2096 while the latest was 23 September 2003. Vernal equinox and autumnal equinox: these classical names are direct derivatives of Latin; these are the universal and still most used terms for the equinoxes, but are confusing because in the southern hemisphere the vernal equinox does not occur in spring and the autumnal equinox does not occur in autumn.
The equivalent common language English terms spring equinox and autumn equinox are more ambiguous. It has become common for people to refer to the September equinox in the southern hemisphere as the Vernal equinox. March equinox and September equinox: names referring to the months of the year in which they occur, with no ambiguity as to which hemisphere is the context, they are still not universal, however, as not all cultures use a solar-based calendar where the equinoxes occur every year in the same month. Although the terms have become common in the 21st century, they were sometimes used at least as long ago as the mid-20th century. Northward equinox and southward equinox: names referring to the appare
Capricornus
Capricornus is one of the constellations of the zodiac. Its name is Latin for "horned goat" or "goat horn" or "having horns like a goat's", it is represented in the form of a sea-goat: a mythical creature, half goat, half fish, its symbol is. Capricornus is one of the 88 modern constellations, was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy. Under its modern boundaries it is bordered by Aquila, Microscopium, Piscis Austrinus, Aquarius; the constellation is located in an area of sky called the Sea or the Water, consisting of many water-related constellations such as Aquarius and Eridanus. It is the smallest constellation in the zodiac. Capricornus is a faint constellation, with only one star above magnitude 3; the brightest star in Capricornus is δ Capricorni called Deneb Algedi, with a magnitude of 2.9, 39 light-years from Earth. Like several other stars such as Denebola and Deneb, it is named for the Arabic word for "tail". Deneb Algedi is a Beta Lyrae variable star.
It ranges by about 0.2 magnitudes with a period of 24.5 hours. The other bright stars in Capricornus range in magnitude from 3.1 to 5.1. Α Capricorni is a multiple star known as Algedi or Giedi. The primary, 109 light-years from Earth, is a yellow-hued giant star of magnitude 3.6.. The two stars are distinguishable by the naked eye, both are themselves multiple stars. Α1 Capricorni is accompanied by a star of magnitude 9.2. The traditional names of α Capricorni come from the Arabic word for "the kid", which references the constellation's mythology.β Capricorni is a double star known as Dabih. It is a yellow-hued giant star of 340 light-years from Earth; the secondary is a blue-white hued star of magnitude 6.1. The two stars are distinguishable in binoculars. Β Capricorni's traditional name comes from the Arabic phrase for "the lucky stars of the slaughterer," a reference to ritual sacrifices performed by ancient Arabs at the heliacal rising of Capricornus. Another star visible to the naked eye is γ Capricorni, sometimes called Nashira.
Π Capricorni is a double star with a blue-white hued primary of magnitude 5.1 and a white-hued secondary of magnitude 8.3. It is 670 light-years from Earth and the components are distinguishable in a small telescope. Several galaxies and star clusters are contained within Capricornus. Messier 30 is a globular cluster located 1 degree south of the galaxy group NGC 7103; the constellation harbors the wide spiral galaxy NGC 6907. M30 is a centrally-condensed globular cluster of magnitude 7.5. At a distance of 30,000 light-years, it has chains of stars extending to the north that are resolvable in small amateur telescopes. One galaxy group located in Capricornus is HCG 87, a group of at least three galaxies located 400 million light-years from Earth, it contains a large elliptical galaxy, a face-on spiral galaxy, an edge-on spiral galaxy. The face-on spiral galaxy is experiencing abnormally high rates of star formation, indicating that it is interacting with one or both members of the group. Furthermore, the large elliptical galaxy and the edge-on spiral galaxy, both of which have active nuclei, are connected by a stream of stars and dust, indicating that they too are interacting.
Astronomers predict that the three galaxies may merge millions of years in the future to form a giant elliptical galaxy. Despite its faintness, Capricornus has one of the oldest mythological associations, having been represented as a hybrid of a goat and a fish since the Middle Bronze Age. First attested in depictions on a cylinder-seal from around the 21st century BC, it was explicitly recorded in the Babylonian star catalogues as MULSUḪUR. MAŠ "The Goat-Fish" before 1000 BC; the constellation was a symbol of the god Ea and in the Early Bronze Age marked the winter solstice. In Greek mythology, the constellation is sometimes identified as Amalthea, the goat that suckled the infant Zeus after his mother, saved him from being devoured by his father, Cronos; the goat's broken horn was transformed into the horn of plenty. According to some ancient Greek myths, it started with the sea-goat Pricus, he was the father of the race of sea-goats, who were honourable creatures. They lived in the sea near the shore.
They could think according to Greek legend. They were favoured by the gods. Pricus is tied to the god of time. Chronos created the immortal Pricus, he had lots of children who lived near the seashore, when they found themselves on the dry land they turned into normal goats, losing their special ability to think and speak in the process. In an effort to prevent this, Pricus turns back time and again. Learning he cannot control their fate and not wanting to be the only Sea Goat prompts him to ask Chronos to let him die; because he is immortal instead, he must spend eternity in the sky as Capricorn. Capricornus is sometimes identified as Pan, the god with a goat's head, who saved himself from the monster Typhon by giving himself a fish's tail and diving into a river. Due to the precession of the equinoxes
Dumuzid
Dumuzid known by the alternate form Tammuz, is an ancient Mesopotamian god associated with shepherds, the primary consort of the goddess Inanna. In Sumerian mythology, Dumuzid's sister was the goddess of vegetation. In the Sumerian King List, Dumuzid is listed as an antediluvian king of the city of Bad-tibira and an early king of the city of Uruk. In the Sumerian poem Inanna Prefers the Farmer, Dumuzid competes against the farmer Enkimdu for Inanna's hand in marriage. In Inanna's Descent into the Underworld, Dumuzid fails to mourn Inanna's death and, when she returns from the Underworld, she allows the galla demons to drag him down to the Underworld as her replacement. Inanna regrets this decision and decrees that Dumuzid will spend half the year in the Underworld, but the other half of the year with her, while his sister Geshtinanna stays in the Underworld in his place, thus resulting in the cycle of the seasons. Gilgamesh references Tammuz in Tablet VI of the Epic of Gilgamesh as one of Ishtar's past lovers, turned into an allalu bird with a broken wing.
Dumuzid was associated with fertility and vegetation and the hot, dry summers of Mesopotamia were believed to be caused by Dumuzid's yearly death. During the month in midsummer bearing his name, people all across Mesopotamia would engage in public, ritual mourning for him. During the late twentieth century, scholars thought that, during the Sumerian Akitu festival, kings may have established their legitimacy by taking on the role of Dumuzid and engaging in ritualized sexual intercourse with the high priestess of Inanna as part of a sacred marriage ceremony; this notion is now rejected by scholars as a misinterpretation of Sumerian literary texts. The cult of Dumuzid was spread to the Levant and to Greece, where he became known under the West Semitic name Adonis; the cult of Ishtar and Tammuz continued to thrive until the eleventh century AD and survived in parts of Mesopotamia as late as the eighteenth century. Tammuz is mentioned by name in the Book of Ezekiel and alluded to in other passages from the Hebrew Bible.
In late nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship of religion, Tammuz was seen as a prime example of the archetypal dying-and-rising god, but the discovery of the full Sumerian text of Inanna's Descent in the mid-twentieth century disproved the previous scholarly assumption that the narrative ended with Dumuzid's resurrection and instead revealed that it ended with Dumuzid's death. The existence of the "dying-and-rising god" archetype has been rejected by modern scholars; the Assyriologists Jeremy Black and Anthony Green describe the early history of Dumuzid's cult as "complex and bewildering". According to the Sumerian King List, Dumuzid was the fifth antediluvian king of the city of Bad-tibira. Dumuzid was listed as an early king of Uruk, where he was said to have come from the nearby village of Kuara and to have been the consort of the goddess Inanna; as Dumuzid sipad, Dumuzid was believed to be the provider of milk, a rare, seasonal commodity in ancient Sumer due to the fact that it could not be stored without spoiling.
In addition to being the god of shepherds, Dumuzid was an agricultural deity associated with the growth of plants. Ancient Near Eastern peoples associated Dumuzid with the springtime, when the land was fertile and abundant, during the summer months, when the land was dry and barren, it was thought that Dumuzid had "died". During the month of Dumuzid, which fell in the middle of summer, people all across Sumer would mourn over his death; this seems to have been the primary aspect of his cult. In Lagash, the month of Dumuzid was the sixth month of the year; this month and the holiday associated with it was transmitted from the Sumerians to Babylonians and other East Semitic peoples, with its name transcribed into those languages as Tammuz. A ritual associated with the Ekur temple in Nippur equates Dumuzid with the snake-god Ištaran, who in that ritual, is described as having died. Dumuzid was identified with the god Ama-ušumgal-ana, a local god worshipped in the city of Lagash. In some texts, Ama-ušumgal-ana is described as a heroic warrior.
As Ama-ušumgal-ana, Dumuzid is associated with its fruits. This aspect of Dumuzid's cult was always joyful in character and had no associations with the darker stories involving his death. To ancient Mesopotamian peoples, the date palm represented stability, because it was one of the few crops that could be harvested all year during the dry season. In some Sumerian poems, Dumuzid is referred to as "my Damu", which means "my son"; this name is applied to him in his role as the personification of the power that causes the sap to rise in trees and plants. Damu is the name most associated with Dumuzid's return in autumn after the dry season has ended; this aspect of his cult emphasized the fear and exhaustion of the community after surviving the devastating summer. Dumuzid had no power outside of his distinct realm of responsibilities. Few prayers addressed to him are extant and, of those that are all of them are requests for him to provide more milk, more grain, more cattle, etc; the sole exception to this rule is a single Assyrian inscription in which a man requests Tammuz that, when he descends to the Underworld, he should take with him a troublesome ghost, haunting him.
The cult of Tammuz was associated with women, who were the ones responsible for mourning his death. The custom of planting miniature gardens with fast-growing plants such as lettuce and fennel, which would be placed out in the hot sun to sprout before withering in the heat, was
Pisces (constellation)
Pisces is a constellation of the zodiac. Its name is the Latin plural for fish, it lies between Aquarius to Aries to the east. The ecliptic and the celestial equator intersect in Virgo, its symbol is. The vernal equinox is located in Pisces, due south of ω Psc, due to precession drifting below the western fish towards Aquarius. Van Maanen's Star, at 12.35 magnitude, is located in this constellation, along with others, such as HD 222410, at 7.45 magnitude. Alrescha, otherwise Alpha Piscium, 139 lightyears, class A2, apparent magnitude 3.62 Fumalsamakah, otherwise Beta Piscium, 492 lightyears, class B6Ve, apparent magnitude 4.48 Delta Piscium, 305 lightyears, class K5III, apparent magnitude 4.44 Epsilon Piscium, 190 lightyears, class K0III, apparent magnitude 4.27 Revati, otherwise Zeta Piscium, 148 lightyears, class A7IV, apparent magnitude 5.21 Alpherg, otherwise Eta Piscium, 294 lightyears, class G8III, apparent magnitude 3.62 Torcular, otherwise Omicron Piscium, 258 lightyears, class K0III, apparent magnitude 4.2 Omega Piscium, 106 lightyears, class F4IV, apparent magnitude 4.03 Gamma Piscium, 320 lightyears, apparent magnitude 12.078.
Κομμένο πρόσωπο Piscium, 680 lightyears, apparent magnitude 16.9 M74 is a loosely wound spiral galaxy in Pisces, found at a distance of 30 million light years. It has many clusters of young stars and the associated nebulae, showing extensive regions of star formation, it was discovered by Pierre Méchain, a French astronomer, in 1780. A type II-P supernova was discovered in the outer regions of M74 by Robert Evans in June 2003. NGC 488 is an isolated face-on prototypical spiral galaxy. NGC 520 is a pair of colliding galaxies located 90 million lightyears away. CL 0024+1654 is a massive galaxy cluster that lenses the galaxy behind it, creating arc-shaped images of the background galaxy; the cluster is made up of yellow elliptical and spiral galaxies, at a distance of 3.6 billion light-years from Earth, half as far away as the background galaxy, at a distance of 5.7 billion light-years.3C 31 is an active galaxy and radio source in Perseus located at a distance of 237 million light-years from Earth.
Its jets, caused by the supermassive black hole at its center, extend several million light-years in both directions, making them some of the largest objects in the universe. Pisces originates from some composition of the Babylonian constellations Šinunutu4 "the great swallow" in current western Pisces, Anunitum the "Lady of the Heaven", at the place of the northern fish. In the first-millennium BC texts known as the Astronomical Diaries, part of the constellation was called DU. NU. NU. Pisces is associated with Aphrodite and Eros, who escaped from the monster Typhon by leaping into the sea and transforming themselves into fish. In order not to lose each other, they tied themselves together with rope; the Romans adopted the Greek legend, with Venus and Cupid acting as the counterparts for Aphrodite and Eros. The knot of the rope is marked by Alpha Piscium called Al-Rischa. In 1690, the astronomer Johannes Hevelius in his Firmamentum Sobiescianum regarded the constellation Pisces as being composed of four subdivisions: Piscis Boreus: σ – 68 – 65 – 67 – ψ1 – ψ2 – ψ3 – χ – φ – υ – 91 – τ – 82 – 78 Psc.
Linum Boreum: χ – ρ,94 – VX – η – π – ο – α Psc. Linum Austrinum: α – ξ – ν – μ – ζ – ε – δ – 41 – 35 – ω Psc. Piscis Austrinus: ω – ι – θ – 7 – β – 5 – κ,9 – λ – TX Psc. Be aware that Piscis Austrinus more refers to a separate constellation in its own right. Both fish depicted in Pisces are said to be the offspring of the one greater fish in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. In 1754, the astronomer John Hill proposed to treat part of Pisces as a separate constellation, called Testudo 24 – 27 – YY – 33 – 29 Psc. centred a natural but faint asterism in which the star 20 Psc is intended to be the head of the turtle. However the proposal was neglected by other astronomers with the exception of Admiral Smyth, who mentioned it in his book The Bedford Catalogue, it is now obsolete; the Fishes are associated with the German legend of Antenteh, who owned just a tub and a crude cabin when he met a magical fish. They offered him a wish. However, his wife begged him to ask for a beautiful furnished home.
This wish was granted. She asked to be a queen and have a palace, but when she asked to become a goddess, the fish became angry and took the palace and home, leaving the couple with the tub and cabin once again; the tub in the story is sometimes recognized as the Great Square of Pegasus. The stars of Pisces were incorporated into several constellations in Chinese astronomy. Wai-ping was a fence that kept a pig farmer from falling into the marshes and kept the pigs where they belonged, it was represented by Alpha, Epsilon, Zeta, Mu, Nu, Xi Piscium. The marshes were represented by the four stars designated Phi Ceti; the northern fish of Pisces was a part of the House of the Sandal, Koui-siou. Pisces is a dim constellation located next to Aquarius, Aries. While the astrological sign Pisces per definition runs from ecliptical longitude 330° to 0, this position is now covered by the constellation of Aquarius, due to
