Talk:IAU designated constellations

message: _ _ The article says
:precise boundaries for each constellation, so that every point in the sky belonged to exactly one constellation
Well, as every careful high-school geometry student knows, boundaries alone can't do that. For each pair of adjacent two constellations, you would have to know which of the two owns the boundary itself. And for many points (half, or a third of them, i guess) where 3 or more meet, you need to know which constellation owns that single point.
_ _  I'm not suggesting the article say that, just that something a little vaguer be said. (In practice, it must be the case that occasionally a nova falls close to a boundary, and two observers may describe it as being in different constellations, unless actual practice is more pragmatic and uses something like "within X micro-degrees of the boundary between J and K". I.e., it's worth discussing why anyone but pedants would want to have such a scheme as Delporte's. All i have to offer on that is original research, so i offer no edit. It's also likely that constellations are mentioned only in the abstracts of professional articles, with coordinates and their experimental errors, and of course the magnitude of the star, actually specifying how to identify it.) --Jerzy•t 15:11, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Boundaries 

message: The introduction ("From the dawn of time...") is quite unnecessary.  Information about what constellations are shouldn't be found on a list page, IMHO.  --203.122.211.204 03:55, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Intro

message: Why? The so called families seems to have no common point. Said: Rursus (☻) 16:47, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I've finally removed them! Skeptic2 (talk) 13:40, 27 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Ursa Major family??

message: Native American, African and Asian cultures have been stargazing for years. Why are their constellations neglected in this article? 76.104.28.221 (talk) 19:49, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: This article is about the IAU's list of standard constellations (including their history, so the mention of Greek astronomy is appropriate), and the only thing that's wrong is that the article title doesn't say so.  So I'm deleting the "Not a worldwide view" tag and adding a "requested move" tag instead. --142.205.241.254 (talk) 22:27, 12 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article is biased towards Western culture  

message: It wouldn't hurt if this article explained why the genitive form of the constellation names is important. Not all of us speak latin, these days.--82.29.136.2 (talk) 21:46, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I wikilinked it, which is a start.  More detailed explanations might be better somewhere else, for example Bayer designation, although the genitive form is also used in Flamsteed designations and variable star designations.  Perhaps a mention here that the genitive is used in such designations.  Lithopsian (talk) 21:56, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Genitives 

message: This was previously moved, with no discussion, to 88 modern constellations; that broke MOS:NUMNOTES, and invited one to answer in what way a constellation can be "modern": there are no new stars visible to the human eye, and those on the list have all been named since at least 1765.  No source in the article uses the name without inverted commas, and the phrase is absent from the article.  I trust the current title is acceptable.  Kevin McE (talk) 18:31, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I support the move to this title (i.e. IAU designated constellations). Agree with issues with the word "modern" etc. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:33, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Hyphenation?  Lithopsian (talk) 21:45, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moved 

message: Isn't the NASA list of names now obsolete? It's the same as the IAU four-letter abbreviations from 1932, repealed in 1955. Skeptic2 (talk) 21:54, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: If I may return to this point, since no one else has commented: The so-called 'NASA abbreviations' in the table are actually the IAU four-letter abbreviations of 1932 which were dropped in 1955. The NASA Dictionary of Technical Terms for Aerospace Use (NASA SP-7), given as the reference for this column, was published in 1965 and never updated. The only abbreviations now used are the three-letter ones. Since these four-letter abbreviations are now obsolete (and have been for over 50 years), do we need them in this table? Skeptic2 (talk) 09:29, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Obsolescence doesn't mean we should just bury it.  An encyclopedia talks about a lot of old stuff (e.g., old constellations).  It's worth including the old 4-letter abbreviations precisely because there are historical sources (like NASA) that refer to them.  But I agree that "IAU" vs "NASA" is the wrong way to present them.  What you just said above ought to be added to the "Abbreviations" section in the article: that IAU originally published 2 sets, that one was abandoned in the 50s, but nevertheless was picked up by NASA in the 60s.  -- Elphion (talk) 10:58, 10 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  I finally got round to doing what you suggested! Skeptic2 (talk) 12:23, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  'NASA' list 

message: User  has twice now added Menzel's "constellation family" as a column in the table.  Though this was once a thing, owing to Menzel's widely circulated field guide, no one uses these any more, as they are not particularly well designed and are in addition historically inaccurate.  Even the field guide has dropped them. This column should be deleted. I have no objection to a link to Donald Howard Menzel#Menzel's Field Guide, which lists the various families and their constituent constellations. But that information should not be duplicated here. -- Elphion (talk) 22:30, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I strongly agree with the above. The column should go, and never return. Skeptic2 (talk) 00:27, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I tend to agree with their removal/deletion - I remember trying (and failing) to find any references for them. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:10, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  I too would support the removal/deletion of the historically inaccurate Menzel "constellation-family" column. AstroLynx (talk) 10:06, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

text: Thank you for removing them. Skeptic2 (talk) 21:44, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Constellation families 

message: After that long discussion above about the "Bayer" constellations, we still list the source as Uranometria.  I propose replacing
:  1603, Uranometria, created by Keyser and de Houtman
with
: 1598, Plancius et al.[ref to footnote]
and the following footnote:
: With the exception of Triangulum Australe (which was mentioned but not precisely charted earlier), these southern constellations first appeared on a globe engraved by Jodocus Hondius and published by Petrus Plancius in 1598. The constellations were based on observations by Dutch navigators Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman, who were commissioned by Plancius to chart the southern sky on a voyage to what is now Indonesia. It is no longer clear who formed the observations into the constellations shown on the globe, and modern authors generally give credit to some combination of Kaiser, de Houtmann, and Plancius. The constellations are also widely but incorrectly attributed to Johann Bayer, since they first became widely known from his star atlas Uranometria, published in 1603.
-- Elphion (talk) 20:08, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plancius, again