Desperately seeking constellations? Part II
I’ve prepared some diagrams for comparison, but I’m not at all happy with them as they don’t look right to me. Not being an ancient Greek, it’s difficult to create something new that still looks reasonably authentic. There’s also the problem that I may be looking at the diagrams I made differently because I made them anyway. I think the genuine one sticks out like a sore thumb, but I’m happy to take comments. Three of the sherds below are modern.
Thanks for the comments on the experiment design. I think that Brett is right, I shouldn’t expect many astronomers to have a familiarity with constellations. I was hoping with the numbers of people there might be enough people there to get some interesting results. I like Lise’s suggestion of contacting amateur astronomers, and perhaps a test open to the public would be better.
So here’s a revised plan. I put up a webpage at the i-Sci centre with a poll script and just show the one sherd and provide ten options:
Random Pattern
Auriga
Boötes
Cepheus
Cetus
Hercules
Orion
Pegasus
Perseus
The Pleiades
I realise this is a leading question, and people will assume it’s a constellation. If it’s random scratching then I’d hope the identification would be spread among many constellations, while if it looks specifically like one, then it would be clear. The above list includes both attributions I’ve seen for the sherd with a some middleweight constellations. It’s not perfect, but it might be good enough to get people discussing what you can do to question whether observed correlations are meaningful. —–
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