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The past couple of months, Mark and I have been working on a series of planetarium fulldome digital shows about stargazing. They're the "next generation" of what we in the planetarium profession like to call the "green arrow" show (so named because in the "olden days" the planetarium lecturer would use a green-arrow pointer to point things out in the sky).
The process of creating the shows got me to thinking about what jumble the stars must seem like for someone who has never gone out stagazing. I'm so used to stepping out and knowing what I'm looking at that I sometimes forget what it's like to NOT know the stars.
That cocky assurance was upended the first time I went to the Southern Hemisphere (back in 1986, for Halley's Comet) and I was confronted with a totally strange new sky. Oh, I recognized SOME patterns, and I had studied the star charts and used the planetarium to learn the skies, but the REALITY of those star-studded skies as seen from Peru was quite a shock.
Every so often, I think about the first stargazers—those humans who first looked up at the sky and tried to make sense of what they saw. It had to be a strange experience to watch the sky each night have NO idea of what those bright, shiny things were. Just out of sheer desperation, I imagine they turned to storytelling to get across the awe and wonder they felt. That's likely where we get the multiplicity of star tales streaming out by word of mouth through every culture. Not only did they help people remember the stars, but those star tales taught cultural values and told historical tales. You can go anywhere in the world and gain insight into a culture's values and history by listening to their ancient star tales.
My friend Ed Krupp, who is director of Griffith Observatory, told me that the stars had a certain utility for early cultures. In a previous blog entry I talked about the moon calendars and their likely link to female cycles. That's a practical use for sky knowledge. Here's another: charting the rise and set time of certain stars in certain seasons to commence agricultural activities. Or, how about this: using the locations of stars on certain dates to to explain a dead Pharoah's trip to the underworld? Or, using a public sundial to mark the passage of time in the marketplace?
We don't have to worry about stuff like that today. We have clocks and calendars and watches and computer programs to help us know the day and time and season. But, being able to do it with the stars sort of gives you a link to the cosmos you didn't know you could forge. Let's not forget how to do that!
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