Drawing the birds path

The Lund Observatory illustration of the Milky Way, completed in 1956. The original work is 2m wide. Click image for a larger view - it's absolutely scrumptious.

More Milky Way-ness. Like the Orrery, depictions of the sky above have been something we have really tried hard to encompass. And so I must mention a couple of especially endearing representations...

The Lund map of the Milky way (in which you can see the Emu dark cloud constellation quite well) is actually an illustration, even though it looks very much like a photograph. Professor Knut Lundmark, in 1955 or something, had a team of astronomers sit down for what must have been quite some time and accurately map and depict the Milky way for all posterity.

Apparently, upon completion of the grand task, the brighter stars had to be 'mussed up' somewhat and made a little more fuzzy. Though painstakingly accurate in their relative brightness to the rest of the illustration, the closer stars just didn't look right... too pointy and sharp. And so, the astronomers pulled out the 19th century version of the Gaussian blur and made everything a little more misty... less accurate, but more believable...

The shape of the Milky Way as deduced from star counts by William Herschel in 1785; the Solar System was assumed near center.

My other favorite depiction of the Milky Way is by William Herschel. When I first saw this I assumed it was from way back, maybe the 13th or 14th century... but no, William made this one in 1785. It is a diagram he made while attempting to count the stars in the Milky way. You may notice that all the stars are all of a rather even amplitude of brightness... it would seem that William had the opposite problem to Professor Lund and his team...

The Birds path

The Milky Way, as depicted by Goldbach, C. F. (Christoph Friedrich), 1763-1811, from somewhere in the northern hemisphere...

The Milky Way is dear to the hearts of many throughout history, including me, always, but especially now. Known as the Bird's Path in the Baltic, the Path of Straw in parts of Africa and Asia, and the Silver River System in Japanese, the Milky Way has, understandably, played a very important role in the Mythologies of our species.

A couple of years ago, I was in Outback Australia, at night. A core group of us were camping together at an abandoned camel-train camp next to a dry creekbed, south of Alice Springs. We were getting to know each other because we were planning to make a theater piece together - Ngapartji Ngapartji.

The main actor/co-writer of the piece, Trevor Jamieson - a young man from the Spinefex mob, suddenly stood up from the campfire and asked if we wanted to see the Emu in the Milky way? Um, sure... (I was expecting a constellation which required, like most of the European constellations, a fair bit of grace and imagination in order to make an image out of 5 disparate stars)... and so we plodded off into the desert night, away from the campfire... and looked up.

The Emu constellation Trevor showed us stretched across the entire sky, from south to north, and was completely, instantly, recognizable, once we knew how to look. The Emu's head rests on the Southern Cross, and its feathers and its body stretch across the sky, right overhead, down to its clawed feet on the northern horizon.

Now for the clincher that had me in tears; it was an anti-constellation. It was the darkness that made the outline of the Emu, not the light. The Emu was made up of the voids within the Milky way, from its beak to its tail... to see it, you looked past the stars, past all that twinkly brightness, into the darkness beyond. And that was where the Emu was.

A constellation like the Emu is what is known in Western archeoastronomy as a dark cloud constellation - I've found a couple of references to cultures that encompass them within their astronomy.. mostly Indigenous Australian nations, cultures from Peru (where the sky is very clear) and some Pacific cultures where they pull the sky past them while traveling.

The idea of shapes and entities made up of voids... of light's role being that of a surrounding boundary, not the substance of the entity... mmm.