Constellations
Man has stared into the Heavens for thousands of years. At first, we saw only shimmering jewels glittering in the Firmament, having no concept of space and stars or planets and Earthlings. There was only man, his family, the village, the country, the ocean and the sky. But what of the sky?
The night lights were constantly moving, constantly shifting and drifting across the sky, but early man noticed there were repeating patterns and memorable formations, shapes and figures to which he gave recognizable names: bear, lion, fish, bird, dragon, hunter, man, woman, and so on. These early constellations are still there, plus many more, but who other than astronomers and amateur buffs really looks at them anymore?
Do most people living in the city ever look up and remember what sort of mysteries lie beyond the harsh glow of the city street lights? Or are they too blinded by their busy urban lifestyles — going from work to the bar, from soccer game to school concert, from shopping mall to shopping mall — to slow down and recollect the grand mystery of the spheres always playing out right over our very heads?
Now, I don’t want to make it sound too dramatic seeing as astronomy, to most people, is about as riveting as watching paint dry — less so if you asked my wife — but fortunately there are decent iPhone apps out there that make astronomy more hands-on and immediate. My favorite one so far is called “SkyView.”
SkyView uses the GPS in your iPhone to identify your latitudinal and longitudinal location, establishes the correct sky dome around your global position and, using the iPhone camera to give you a see-through window, overlays the proper constellation patterns and planetary positions on your screen as you scan the Heavens with your phone. It tracks the Sun, the Moon and the planets and shows the elliptical slant of the solar system, showcasing the way the Heavenly bodies chase each other through the sky in such a simple-to-understand format that even Copernicus would be awed. Not only that, but SkyView also labels all the orbiting satellites in your field of vision and names every star in the sky (even the ones you can’t see from the city), taking all the memorization and night-vision-preserving flashlights out of amateur astronomy. “Augmented reality” indeed.
So now, with a simple tap of an icon, you can view the constellations in a way that took mankind thousands of years of develop and was, at one time, a secret knowledge possessed only by high priests and shamans. The secret machinations of the night sky are contained within a 21.5 MB program and are available for $0.99 on the App Store.
Wouldn’t our star-gazing ancestors be amazed at these vaunted accomplishments? Where they built monolithic monuments and humongous pyramids in alignment with the stars, we built a tiny device capable of mapping and charting them in the blink of an eye, even during the daytime. “Where’s Jupiter? Oh, there it is, just below the horizon line; it hasn’t risen yet. But it will be right there at 10:33 PM. Hey look! The Hubble telescope is passing just overhead. See that faint moving ball of light?”
We take it for granted just how amazing our modern-day technology really is. In any other age, smartphones would be considered sorcery and we’d all be burned at the stake.
