Please join us for our July 3rd monthly meeting. This meeting will be conducted in-person and on-line via Zoom.

In addition to our regular astronomy related discussions and information, Ray Harris, a member of the Lehigh Valley Amateur Astronomical Society will present, “Lost Constellations.”

The saga of how we arrived at our current 88 official constellations is an interesting one. Many cultures had their own star lore, but Renaissance Europeans started with the 48 constellations described by Claudius Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy) in his 2nd-Century Almagest. Of course, Ptolemy himself relied on earlier works, but these are mostly lost to us. The Almagest survived through the centuries and in the early 1500’s when the first printed celestial charts appeared, it was considered the ultimate authority for nearly all celestial knowledge. It’s therefore not surprising that the earliest examples of celestial cartography relied on the Almagest and displayed only Ptolemy’s constellations.

So, where did the rest of our constellations come from? Just as terrestrial cartographers filled the oceans with sea monsters to make their works more interesting and desirable, celestial cartographers began to fill empty places in the heavens with new constellations. Following the invention of the telescope, fainter stars began to be charted and these also contributed to the invention of new constellations. Constellations didn’t have any formal boundaries, so cartographers felt free to carve out areas between the existing constellation figures to fashion new creations. Some of these new constellations were adopted by other cartographers and remained popular for decades. Others were short-lived and failed to gain widespread acceptance.

Inventing constellations was so popular that more than 100 new ones had been introduced by 1800. To end the chaos, the International Astronomical Union formally published a list of 88 constellations and their boundaries in 1930 giving us our current heavenly menagerie. As a result, 41 modern constellations have been permanently enshrined in our skies along with all but one of Ptolemy’s 48. As a result, more than 60 constellations created between 1536 and 1822 were temporarily adopted but then abandoned and lost to us except for their appearance in old star charts and atlases.

Using images from early printed celestial charts and atlases, Ray Harris will introduce us to many of the more important constellations that were created but later abandoned.

About the speaker:

Ray Harris is the son of a career Naval officer. Ray grew up mostly near Naval facilities in Virginia and California, graduating high school on the Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He attended Yale University and upon graduation spent five years in the Navy supervising reactor operations on a nuclear submarine. He left the service for a career in civilian nuclear power. He joined PPL in Allentown in 1980 as staff supporting the Susquehanna nuclear power plants in Berwick. He later moved into PPL corporate IT before retiring in 2009.

In 1984, Ray bought a C-8. He joined the Lehigh Valley Amateur Astronomical Society (LVAAS) in 1985 and began exploring and photographing the night sky (back before the digital imaging age). His photo of the Horsehead Nebula appeared in the January 1990 issue of Sky & Telescope. In 1987 he purchased a pair of celestial charts published in 1741. He discovered a couple of deep-sky objects on these charts and for the past 37 years, Ray has been researching and collecting early celestial charts and atlases. Ray’s article “The First Deep-Sky Atlas” appeared in the January 2022 issue of Sky & Telescope and his article “The Constellations of Petrus Plancius” appeared in the February 2023 issue. Ray resides in Macungie, PA, with his wife who does not share his interest in astronomy but who does share his love of early celestial charts as works of art.

Our meetings are free and open to the public.

The in-person meeting begins at 7:30 pm at Upper Dublin Lutheran Church, 411 Susquehanna Road, Ambler (19002). The Zoom link for this meeting, starting at 7:30 pm, can be obtained by sending a request to info@bma2.org.

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