Why We Watch the Stars

“The movements of the heavenly bodies are an admirable thing, well known and manifest to all peoples. There are no people, no matter how barbaric and primitive, that do not raise up their eyes, take note, and observe with some care and admiration the continuous and uniform course of the heavenly bodies.” Bernabé Cobo, 1653.

Cobo was an early 17^th century explorer of Latin America, and in his many journeys and encounters with the people there, he was able to gain an appreciation for just how important the stars were to those cultures. As he rightly states, there is no state of man so primitive that we are not compelled to look into the sky in wonderment.

It has been an enduring fascination of mine, and with all the same fervour that doubtless compelled the religious leaders of the ancient world to ascribe supernatural powers to the stars. Their permanence in the night sky; wandering slowly and in accordance with one another; their apparent formation into meaningful figures: these are the causes for a very human fascination.

With the full awareness that the stars are not gods, that they do not orbit the Earth (although research shows that a great many early astronomers had already deduced this), nor place humans at the centre of the universe – even now, we find ourselves under a clear night sky, far from the light pollution of the cities, and we stare upwards into the belts of the Milky Way at pinpricks of light that have travelled millennia to reach us.

As you can imagine, then, the appearance of the brightest celestial phenomenon in history must have caused quite a stir. In 1054 AD, the Crab Nebula was born, and for nearly two years it was a feature of the night sky (in fact, for twenty-three days, it was even bright enough to be seen in daylight). This event is often used as a sort of “proof of age”, as it is a widely-recognised event that was of note to the whole of humanity. As such, finding references to its appearance provides us with a reasonable estimate of the date upon which that reference was made – whether in the written form or in “mere” pictograms such as those used by the Anasazi of North America.