3 ms·
One thing that I learned about constellations when playing around with Stellarium: the 88 modern constellations are defined with nice round number coordinates,
by senkora 2y ago
One thing that I learned about constellations when playing around with Stellarium: the 88 modern constellations are defined with nice round number coordinates, but in terms of the Earth's position in 1875. Since the Earth has shifted since then, that means that the constellation boundaries are not aligned at all with modern celestial coordinate systems.
In fact, Stellarium doesn't even support the 1875 celestial coordinate system that was used to define the modern constellations. (Which is fair; I'm sure that this is a very niche thing that is not at all useful for modern astronomy)
- itishappy 2y agoPlus, neither the constellations nor our Solar System are static. Our sky moves!