AS101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Celestial Equator, Apparent Magnitude, Ecliptic
Document Summary
When you look up at the universe, you look out through a layer of air only about. With the naked eye, we can see more than 2000 stars. A band of light making a circle around the celestial sphere. Our view into the plane of our galaxy. Ancient civ. around the world named groups of stars called constellations. Names were based on ancient heroes, gods, animals and shapes and mythology was associated with them. Many star patterns recognized today originated 5,000 years with babylonians, In 1928, the international astronomical union (iau) established 88 of cial constellations with clearly de ned permanent boundaries that together cover the entire sky. Just like the map of the earth is divided into countries, a map of the sky is divided into constellations. A constellation now rep. not a group of stars but a section of the sky: a viewing direction. Any star within the region belongs to only that one constellation.
