Roughly speaking, the Sun appears against a different constellation every new Moon, the stars forming a distant backdrop to the Sun. The number of constellations in the Western zodiac comes from the cycles of the Moon, which orbits the Earth 12.4 times a year. The Incas, for example, made constellations not from stars, but from the dark patches in the Milky Way. How could they, since they are truly random scatterings of stars? They are meant to represent, not to portray.Īlthough the constellations of the zodiac, which date back to Mesopotamia or before, may seem definitive, they are only one example of those produced by the various cultures of the world, all of which had their own, frequently very different, notions of how the sky is constructed. It is a disappointment to many that the constellations only rarely look like what they represent. They are collectively called the zodiac and consist almost entirely of animal figures, like the ram (Aries), crab (Cancer) and lion (Leo). Over the course of a year, the Sun appears to pass through a belt of sky containing 12 ancient constellations, or groupings, of stars.
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