Welcome to the Ancient-Skies featured blog
Learn more about certain stellar constellations, about cultures and their astronomy, about names for stars, planets, sun, moon and other celestial objects - and the stories and mythologies behind these names.
And of course this is the place to learn more about the project and the work behind the curtain.
Enjoy!
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Written by Doris Vickers
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Saturday, 17 October 2009 19:28 |
Andromeda is subject of our first blog entry.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the story, here's the short version:
Andromeda was the beautiful daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia of Ethiopia. Cassiopeia foolishly claimed that she was more beautiful than the Nereids. Such arrogance rarely goes unpunished in Greek mythology and lo and behold! Poseidon sent the sea-monster Cetus to devastate the coastal regions of Ethiopia. The deperate king consulted the oracle in Delphi and was told to sacrifice his daughter to the monster and the problem would be solved. So Andromeda gets chained naked to the cliffs. No Greek myth without the obligatory hero either: Perseus, who was just returning home from slaying the Gorgo Medusa, flies over Ethiopia and saw the young woman's life threatened and rescues her by slaying the sea-monster. Of course, in return for such heroic intervention, he gets to marry Andromeda!
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The Fante People of western africa - and how we came to know them |
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Written by Rüdiger Schultz
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Friday, 09 July 2010 17:14 |
We were very pleased, when John Dunn contacted us in october 2009 and told us about the short monography his uncle wrote 1934 about the star lore of the Fante fishermen in the Ghana coastal region.
Once we received a copy of the article, we started to transform the information into our knowledgebase.
In fact, this was exactly the situation we had in mind, when we first thought about and created our infrastructure: Someone somewhere on this planet has access to information about the astronomical knowledge of a certain human culture. He or she contacts us, and tells us about it. To preserve this part of the heritage of this human culture, the information is transformed into our knowledgebase, verified by another project member against the original source, and finally published globally.
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Written by Doris Vickers
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Saturday, 17 October 2009 18:24 |
Welcome to the Ancient-Skies blog!
We are going to present a short overview of the history of one of the constellations about two times a month - going through them alphabetically (the information about some constellations is going to be more detailed and/or lengthy than others!).
We hope that the information is valuable to you (although the blog entry is not going to quite full source texts, but only reference them).
Enjoy!
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