Category:Single star-asterism: Difference between revisions

Sinology distinguishes between single star-asterisms (star names) and multi star-asterisms (groups of stars, connected with imagined lines).

A star name in the modern sense labels a host star of a planetary system and a star name in the classical sense (popular astronomy) labels a dot of light in the sky.

A single star-asterism may consider the dot as the centre of the adjacent dark areas (or a group of faint stars in the vicinity of a bright star) implying that it entails more than only the dot of light. For instance, in ancient Egyptian and Babylonian astronomy, twilight observations of heliacal phenomena were most relevant for time-keeping. Hence, depending on the context (night or twilight), the asterism is seen differently. A constellation of faint stars (like Egyptian Sopdet, consisting of 3 stars) would not be visible as only one star (Sirius) in the most relevant observation.