Definitive constellation drawings

[rusirius]

Seeing the post about a definitive moon map set me thinking about a definitive constelation drawing map or index. I'm currently doing a project to draw a constellation chart. I've looked at several references but I find that not everyone draws the constellation art the same. I have 2 astronomy books (Atlas of the Universe: Patrick Moore : Philips; and Astronomy : A Begginers Guide to the Sky at Night : Igloo) with star maps and these draw the constellations slightly differently, but fairly similarly. Of the computer based planetarium programs, Stellarium is fairly close to the two books and practically identical to the book Astronomy, but Cartes du Ciel draws the constellations radically differently. Cybersky is closer to Stellarium bit still with some significant differences. Redshift 6 doesn't seem to draw them at all, just identifies their names and boundaries. Autostar suite from Mead also raws them differently.

So I was wondering, is there a definitive way of drawing the constellations or is it down to interpretations and the preferences of authors?

[acey]

The constellations and their boundaries were fixed in 1922 by the International Astronomical Union, but they did not fix any way of "joining the dots" - that's a matter of choice. As well as choosing where to draw the lines you also need to choose which stars to include: because the constellations are defined only by their boundaries on the sky, there's no limit to the faintness of their stars.

[proflight2000]

The rule of thumb of course is the use of greek characters and their reasoning be it size or identifying bright to least bright etc, i.e. Alpha, beta, Gamma, as you will see from the main drawings in good constellation books. Use what the eye can truly see, there is really no point adding stars that are so distant no one can see them anyways even if they had your chart with them.

[rusirius]

Yes, I had thought to exclude anything below mag 6 or maybe 5, because mag 6 is the faintest that the naked eye can see.

[acey]

Regarding the question of which stars to join with which lines, I think you'll find most maps don't link stars of magnitude greater than 4 - once you get to 6 there are just too many stars.

The whole idea of a skeleton drawing for a constellation is to help the eye find the pattern on the sky. The simpler the pattern, the easier it is to find. A general principle seems to be to create patterns that make a closed shape without crossed lines.

[Dave]

I Like H. A. Reys interpretations of the constellations.

http://kopion.uchicago.edu/drallen/Astro302/Constellations/constellations.html

Most of them look like what they should be.

Dave

[acey]

I think he's tried too hard to make Taurus look like a four-legged animal - traditionally it was drawn as just the bull's head. Not sure about prancing Leo either.