Sky Cultures 05

Shapes in the Dark

In the Andes and in Australia the constellations are the dark clouds between the stars: a llama, a toad, a tinamou and an emu.

Working out when this is best placed from where you are…

Latitude

Longitude

Which night

Date

Hour

Used for this lesson only — your map settings, and every other lesson, stay as they are.

Sources

HYG stellar database v4.2 — star positions, magnitudes and every separation quoted here
Urton, At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky: An Andean Cosmology (University of Texas Press, 1981)
Salomon & Urioste (trans.), The Huarochirí Manuscript (University of Texas Press, 1991), ch. 29 — Yacana drinks the sea
Fuller, Norris & Trudgett, "The Astronomy of the Kamilaroi and Euahlayi Peoples and Their Neighbours", Australian Aboriginal Studies 2014/2, 3
Norris, "Dawes Review 5: Australian Aboriginal Astronomy and Navigation", PASA 33, e039 (2016)
Falchi et al., "The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness", Science Advances 2, e1600377 (2016)
Bortle, "The Bortle Dark-Sky Scale", Sky & Telescope, February 2001

← GUIDES

From the high Andes the Milky Way is Mayu, the river, bright enough that the eye starts reading the dark as shapes. In the Quechua village of Misminay, near Cusco, the anthropologist Gary Urton was shown two kinds of constellation in the 1970s: star-to-star figures, and yana phuyu, black clouds — animals that come down the river to drink. The dark ones mattered more.

The ring marks the sharpest hole in the Milky Way, beside the Southern Cross: the Coalsack, a cloud of dust about 600 light-years away that blocks the stars behind it. In Misminay it is Yutu, the tinamou, a ground bird. Further along the river are Hanp'atu, the toad, and Mach'acuay, the serpent; each cloud's comings and goings are read against the season its animal is about.

Two bright stars in a dark lane beside the Cross, Rigil Kentaurus and Hadar, are Llamaq ñawin: the eyes of Yacana, the great dark llama, who walks the river with her young beneath her. A manuscript from Huarochirí, around 1608, says that at midnight, unseen, she drinks the sea — or the world would flood. The eyes are no pair: one is 4.4 light-years away, the other about 390.

The same dark lanes hold another animal, seen across much of Australia. Its head is the Coalsack; its neck runs down between Rigil Kentaurus and Hadar; its body and legs are the dust clouds towards Scorpius. To the Kamilaroi and Euahlayi peoples it is Gawarrgay, the Emu in the Sky, and neighbouring peoples across the continent know it under their own names.

Run four hours and watch the Emu swing: each night's turn is the year's in miniature, and the Emu is a calendar. In April and May, just after dark, it is seen running, legs out — the time emus mate. By June and July it lies along the horizon in the evening, like a bird on its nest, and emu eggs are gathered: some, never all.

Now the same sky from a city. The stars that make the Cross and the Scorpion survive; the llama, the toad, the tinamou and the emu do not exist. Constellations made of darkness need a truly dark sky — around Bortle 3 — and they are the first thing light pollution takes. A third of humanity can no longer see the Milky Way from home — and with it go most of these stories.