SCIENCE WEEK IRELAND:HUMANS HAVE studied the same night sky for thousands of years yet there was seldom agreement on what was on show. Where some saw a bear others pictured a plough or a water dipper.
A presentation on how our view of the stars has changed through the ages takes place today at the University of Limerick when Robert Hill of the Armagh Planetarium delivers a talk entitled The Cosmos Revealed.
Mr Hill is the director of the Northern Ireland Space Office at the planetarium, and has delivered a number of talks during Science Week Ireland about how humans have interpreted the stars.
His presentation today, which was also given on Thursday at the University of Limerick, will include amazing images captured by the Hubble space telescope.
"It is a look at how we have long used ground-based telescopes and now moved to space-based telescopes," he said. "It is very much a journey."
Civilisations around the world have studied the night sky and recorded the movements of the stars and planets, with the Chinese responsible for some of the oldest records.
Most societies believed that understanding the stars could deliver an important advantage.
"They believed looking at the night sky was a way to predict the future," Mr Hill said.
He uses the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear, as an example of how these societies saw what was appropriate to them. Stargazers in the US see the seven stars that make up the bear's tail and hindquarters as a long-handled dipper, while in Ireland these form The Plough.
The Chinese saw these seven stars as the emperor's administrators, who pointed out Polaris, the North Star, that represented the emperor himself.
"Although we saw the same stars, we put the dots together differently," Mr Hill said.
The use of telescopes to get a better view of the cosmos began in the early 1600s and the technology improved through the centuries until the great reflector telescopes were constructed in the 1800s.
All these look "up and out" and we had no telescopic view of the earth itself until the advent of space flight, Mr Hill said. The Hubble space telescope has produced many important discoveries by looking outwards, but we now also use orbiting telescopes to study earth.
Mr Hill delivers his presentation, The Cosmos Revealed, today in the Jean Monnet lecture theatre, University of Limerick, at 10am and 1.10pm.