Legends of the Southern Cross
“… to greet lame the inspired sky
amazed to stumble where gods get lost
beneath the Southern Cross.”
- From the song “Beneath the Southern Cross” by Patti Smith
Dante Alighieri wrote about it. Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang about it. And it’s high on the must-see list of every northern stargazer who travels south of the equator. I’m talking, of course, of the constellation Crux, the Southern Cross, the most famous sight of the deep southern sky. Though Crux is the smallest of all 88 constellations, it’s nestled in the thickest star clouds of the southern Milky Way and rich with deep-sky wonders.
With its trademark crooked-kite shape, tiny Crux is as much a fixture in the southern skies as the Big Dipper or Cassiopeia in the north. The constellation is circumpolar south of 34 degrees S latitude and visible every night of the year, though it’s best viewed high overhead in the early evening from April through June. During these months, south of the Tropic of Cancer (23.5 degrees N latitude), northern-hemisphere stargazers can glimpse the Southern Cross– just barely, above the southern horizon.
Once, Crux was easier to see from the northern hemisphere. The Ancient Greeks knew its stars, though they counted them among the constellation Centaurus. And Crux certainly appeared in the sky in the middle-East around the time of the birth of Christ. But the slow precession of the Earth’s axis has carried Crux southward, and its stars haven’t appeared north of the the Tropic of Cancer for more than a thousand years.
The stars of Crux, the Southern Cross, and alpha and beta Centauri
Europeans recovered the these stars during southern sea voyages of the 16th century and assigned the constellation’s present name. Early explorers were unsettled by the disappearance of the north star as they sailed south across the equator. But they saw Crux as a good omen. In the early 16th century, Amerigo Vespucci noted two of the bright stars, Acrux and Mimosa, and Andrea Corsali mapped the full constellation, which he described as ‘so fair and beautiful that no other heavenly sign may be compared to it’. Vespucci recalled Dante’s reference to these four stars in his Divine Comedy. When Dante and Beatrice finally ascended from Hell on the far side of the world, they saw four brilliant stars which they took to represent the four principal virtues, Justice, Prudence, Fortitude, and Temperance:
“To the right hand I turn’d and fix’d my mind
On the other pole attentive where I saw
Four stars ne’er seen before save by the ken
Of our first parents. Heaven of their rays
Seem’d joyous. Oh thou northern site, bereft
Indeed, and widow’d, since of these deprived”
Dante may have known of Crux from historical records of classical observations. Or he may have learned of the stars from the 13th-century travelogues of his contemporary Marco Polo, who likely saw them as he sailed south around the Malay peninsula on the way to China.
But of course, Crux has been known as long as humans have looked at the sky, and many indigenous cultures includes these stars in their legends…
• Australian Aborgines saw the dark nebula in Crux called the Coalsack as the head of a great, evil emu.
• In Indonesia and Malaysia, and some coastal Australian Aborignal tribes, Crux was a stingray
• The Maori of New Zealand see Crux as an anchor called “Te Punga”
• The /Xam bushmen of southern Africa though the three brightest stars of Crux were celestial female lions
• And to the !Kung bushmen, the Coal Sack in Crux was “Old Bag of the Night”
Next time, we’ll tour the stars of this famous constellation. But for now, that’s it…
