The Big Dipper - An Asterism

eriktheawful
reply to post by Soylent Green Is People
...Each constellation has a certain area designated around them. You can call up these areas in any star viewing program like Stellarium. If you ever find an object in one of those areas, you can give not only the RA and Dec coordinates, but you can also indicate that it is in the "Constellation of Aries" or whatever constellation that area covers...

Oh. I get it, and I completely agree that the constellations are a great method for identifying anything in the sky -- considering the "official" constellations are not just groups of stars, but whole regions of the skies as you so well showed in the image you posted:

eriktheawful

It makes sense, as you pointed out, to have the whole sky covered by these constellation regions in order to have a method for naming stars and tracking objects (for example, stars is the region of Taurus would be designated "Alpha Tau", "Beta Tau", "37 Tau", etc.; and as you said, to track objects that move across the sky -- i.e., to say that a certain comet is currently located "In Taurus")

I was just saying that in my mind, and in the minds of humans for thousands of years prior to this official way of designating stars and tracking objects based on which area of the sky they occupy (i.e., in which constellation), the big dipper (or plow, or basket, or whatever other cultures called that group of stars) is still unofficially a "constellation".

Great thread, by the way.