A UNIVERSE FULL OF WONDER
Thousands of years ago, ancient civilizations turned to the heavens, marveling at their wonders. These ancient people worshipped various gods and often linked their gods with planets in the sky, which they considered to be “wandering stars.”
The ancient Greeks saw the five visible planets and called them “wandering stars” because they moved randomly across the sky instead of staying in fixed positions like the stars. The word “planet” comes from the Greek word for “wanderer.”
There is one essential thing the ancient Greeks did not understand about the solar system. The Greeks saw a pantheon of gods controlling various aspects of the Earth and skies. Each of their gods had all of the bad traits of humans struggling with each other. It was the Judeo-Christian concept of one almighty and wise creator God who created an orderly system that led to the scientific understanding of the cosmos.
Today, we can study and understand the wisdom of God in creation. Because of that, we can know where the planets and stars, as well as solar and lunar eclipses, will be visible at any given time and from any location on Earth. Those “wandering stars” are not wandering after all.
“Wandering stars” is a term usually applied to the planets. When ancient stargazers created the original constellations thousands of years ago, they called the stars that formed those constellations “fixed,” because they appeared rooted in their relative positions to each other. But the planets were different, because they seemingly had the freedom to wander at will among the stars. In fact, the stars are far from fixed; if we wait around long enough, we will see them change their positions, too. One fine example can be found high in the southern sky during the mid-to-late evening hours: the brilliant yellow-orange jewel known as Arcturus, which is the brightest star in the kite-shaped constellation of Boötes, the Herdsman. It’s about 37 light-years away and is 180 times more luminous than Earth’s sun.
The word ‘planets’ comes from the ancient Greek word πλανήτης (planētēs) meaning “wanderer”, and the Greek word for star is ἀστήρ (astēr) – and so ἀστήρ πλανήτης (astēr planētēs), means ‘wandering stars’. Thus it was that the Greeks called the planets wandering stars – they looked like bright stars, but their paths wandered and deviated relative to the “fixed” stars, which appear to wheel overhead at night.
Like the wise Egyptians, Sumerians and other ancient cultures, the Greeks associated the planets with certain of their gods and goddesses and their particular influences on life and human affairs as they moved through the ecliptic constellations of the Zodiac. Other ancient societies, like those in China and India, also connected the movement of planets with influencing personal attributes and events, all in what would later be referred to as Astrology – as opposed to the purely mathematical and data driven science of Astronomy.
The New Kingdom Egyptian tomb ceiling was painted, and while astronomy is usually attributed to the Sumerians first, the astronomical alignments with ancient Egyptian megaliths predate them, and tell us that we should have no doubt of its practice in the earliest Aeons of Egyptian history. To them, astronomy/astrology was a link with the divine, and so they incorporated astronomical themes and alignments into almost every aspect of their lives, their architecture and their spiritual belief system.
in accordance with the Egyptian goddess Nuit’s statement “Every man and every woman is a star”, we recognize that each one of us is a Wandering Star, a divine spark expressed through a human vehicle – each one like Ra – experiencing birth, life and apparent death upon this lovely blue and green planet, our precious Mother Earth.
Known as the goddess Hathor by the ancient Egyptians, and now called Gaia by the greater global spiritual community, our planet Earth and it’s miraculous biosphere is our Greater Temple – and our most Sacred Space.
Ancient Greeks were familiar with the dull-white star that shone steadily across the clear skies of the Aegean Sea in the warm glow of dawn. They called it Apollo. In Egypt the horoscopus priests of Thebes looked across the Nile toward Karnak and recognized it as the evil star of Set fleeing upward before Amun-Ra at dawn to be vanquished and disappear in the brilliance of the rising sun god.
Both Greeks and Egyptians thought the morning star was different from another star seen close to the Sun after sunset. The Greeks named the evening star that lingered in the sunset glow across the Ionian Sea Hermes, the winged messenger of the gods, while the Thebans recognized it as Horus, the vanquisher of Set and follower of Amun-Ra.
The Planets, Mercury and Venus, orbiting the Sun within Earth’s path around the central luminary of the Solar System, have been known from ancient times. Early man thought that there were four of these wandering stars, attendants to the Sun-two in the morning skies and two others in the evening skies.
The ancient Greeks believed that Earth was at the center of the universe, and the planets—which included the Sun and Moon revolved on fixed, concentric spheres. Over time, philosophers and scientists from Copernicus to Kant to Hubble modified this perspective until Earth was viewed as just one of many planets, orbiting an average star that, itself, orbited the distant center of the Milky Way, which was one of many galaxies.
The Sun is not the only object that moves among the fixed stars. The Moon and each of the planets that are visible to the unaided eye—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus (although just barely)—also change their positions slowly from day to day. During a single day, the Moon and planets all rise and set as Earth turns, just as the Sun and stars do. But like the Sun, they have independent motions among the stars, superimposed on the daily rotation of the celestial sphere. Noticing these motions, the Greeks of 2000 years ago distinguished between what they called the fixed stars—those that maintain fixed patterns among themselves through many generations—and the wandering stars, or planets. The word “planet,” in fact, means “wanderer” in ancient Greek.
Today, we do not regard the Sun and Moon as planets, but the ancients applied the term to all seven of the moving objects in the sky. Much of ancient astronomy was devoted to observing and predicting the motions of these celestial wanderers. They even dedicated a unit of time, the week, to the seven objects that move on their own; that’s why there are 7 days in a week. The Moon, being Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor, has the fastest apparent motion; it completes a trip around the sky in about 1 month. To do this, the Moon moves about 12°, or 24 times its own apparent width on the sky, each day.
The individual paths of the Moon and planets in the sky all lie close to the ecliptic, although not exactly on it. This is because the paths of the planets about the Sun, and of the Moon about Earth, are all in nearly the same plane, as if they were circles on a huge sheet of paper. The planets, the Sun, and the Moon are thus always found in the sky within a narrow 18-degree-wide belt, centered on the ecliptic, called the zodiac (The root of the term “zodiac” is the same as that of the word “zoo” and means a collection of animals; many of the patterns of stars within the zodiac belt reminded the ancients of animals, such as a fish or a goat.)
How the planets appear to move in the sky as the months pass is a combination of their actual motions plus the motion of Earth about the Sun; consequently, their paths are somewhat complex. As we will see, this complexity has fascinated and challenged astronomers for centuries.
The backdrop for the motions of the “wanderers” in the sky is the canopy of stars. If there were no clouds in the sky and we were on a flat plain with nothing to obstruct our view, we could see about 3000 stars with the unaided eye. To find their way around such a multitude, the ancients found groupings of stars that made some familiar geometric pattern or (more rarely) resembled something they knew. Each civilisation found its own patterns in the stars, much like a modern Rorschach test in which you are asked to discern patterns or pictures in a set of inkblots. The ancient Chinese, Egyptians, and Greeks, among others, found their own groupings—or constellations—of stars. These were helpful in navigating among the stars and in passing their star lore on to their children.
You may be familiar with some of the old star patterns we still use today, such as the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, and Orion the hunter, with his distinctive belt of three stars .However, many of the stars we see are not part of a distinctive star pattern at all, and a telescope reveals millions of stars too faint for the eye to see. Therefore, during the early decades of the 20th century, astronomers from many countries decided to establish a more formal system for organizing the sky.
