Since thousands of years ago, people around the world have been looking up into the sky, trying to find patterns of visible stars’ distribution, and dividing them into different groups called constellations. Originally, constellations are recognized and organized by people’s imaginations based on the shapes of the star distribution. The most two famous groups of stars is the “Big Dipper” and th...

Namoratunga, a megalithic site in northwestern Kenya, has an alignment of 19 basalt pillars that are nonrandomly oriented toward certain stars and constellations. The same stars and constellations are used by modern eastern Cushitic peoples to calculate an accurate calendar. The fact that Namoratunga dates to about 300 B.C. suggests that a prehistoric calendar based on detailed astronomical kno...

Contrary to the story of the star-counter in Le Petit Prince, there aren’t unnumerable stars in the night sky, at least so far as we can see with our own eyes. Only about a thousand are visible. Almost all have names or Greek letter designations as part of constellations that anyone can learn to recognize. Modern astronomers have divided the sky into 88 constellations, many of them fictitious— ...

death and afterworld are among those vexing questions for humankind. in both eastern and western literature there are many works attempting to describe afterworld and resurrection as a journey to the other world. sanaei’s seir-al-ebad elal-ma’ad and ardaviraf nameh are two examples of such journeys. based on the gnostic experiences of resurrection, the two texts depict exciting and marvelous im...

In this study, we build a database specialized for astronomical education. The database consists of the information that planetarium curators have about astronomy and the stars. We suggest that the database should have a structure based on constellations, mirroring the basic way in which humans perceive the night sky. Furthermore, we develop a web system for astronomy education using Ajax. The ...

To determine attitude or direction with star constellations is perhaps the oldest method in the field of navigation and control. Besides its accuracy, star constellations can give three axis information by using just a single sensor, a digital CCD camera. What is very easy for men looking at the stars turns out to be complex if done by an onboard computer. The process of star identification can...

Drug discovery and subsequent availability of a new breakthrough therapeutic or 'cure' is a compelling example of societal benefit from research advances. These advances are invariably collaborative, involving the contributions of many scientists to a discovery network in which theory and experiment are built upon. To document and understand such scientific advances, data mining of public and c...