Billions and Billions of Stars Quiz

Answer: The Milky Way

It is not a cloud (which the incorrect options all are), it is actually our galaxy, which is called the Milky Way because of what you see in the night sky. The galaxy is a flat spiral in shape, and our planet is near the outside of it, so if you look towards the centre of the galaxy you see so many stars that they seem to merge into a white, milky, glow, rather than standing out as individual stars.

Answer: Orion

According to Greek mythology, Orion was a giant, and a great hunter. There are lots of different versions of his life story, including one that says he was killed by a scorpion, which is why the constellation named after him is on the opposite side of the sky from that of Scorpio, the scorpion.

Orion is one of the easiest constellations to recognise, with the three stars forming his belt and the three stars pointing downwards from it to form his sword standing out clearly in the night sky. Orion lies close to the celestial equator, which means that it can be seen from both hemispheres. However, when I moved from the northern hemisphere to the southern one, I was surprised to find that he seemed to be standing on his head!

The star Betelgeuse (pronounced as if it were Beetle Juice), was my brother's favorite star to find and name when we were children. Mine was Rigel, the bright white star that forms Orion's foot on the side opposite to Betelgeuse (in the lower right corner of the image used for this question).

Answer: Ursa Major

Ursa is Latin for bear, but you need a vivid imagination to see a bear up there! I just look for the portion which I recognise easily, the Big Dipper, shaped like a ladle that you might dip into a bucket of water. Astronomers call it an asterism, which means it is a pattern formed by the stars, but not a proper constellation.

In Africa, it is sometimes called a gourd rather than a dipper, while in many parts of Europe it is described as a plough or a wagon.

Answer: It is Polaris, the North Star

Like the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper is only part of a constellation - in its case, Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. The star at the end of its handle is always (very close to) directly north, so it can be used to help you find your way if you are lost at night. Because the stars are constantly moving in space, and the patterns change because of shifts in the Earth's axis of rotation, it will not always be the North Star - around 3000 CE, the pole star will be Gamma Cephei.

Answer: Summer Triangle

Altair is the brightest star in the constellation of Aquila, Deneb of Cygnus and Vega of Lyra. (I won't translate these names, as we will be seeing at least one of them again.) In the northern hemisphere, the Summer Triangle can be seen overhead and quite bright during the summer, but is also appears in the eastern sky during spring, and in the western sky during autumn. For those of us who live in the southern hemisphere, it is visible (upside down, and low in the sky rather than overhead) during our winter.

There is a Chinese legend, 'The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd', dating over 2500 years ago, which refers to this pattern. Vega is called the Weaver Girl Star, and Altair the Cowherd Star. These two love each other deeply, but this was forbidden, and they were doomed to stay separate in the sky except for one day a year, when magpies form a bridge to join them briefly.

Answer: Crux

The word crux is Latin for cross. While the ancient Greeks could see these stars, they considered them to be part of the larger constellation of Centaurus. By around 400 BCE, the motion of the stars in the sky had led to it only being visible from the southern hemisphere (unless you are very near the equator, in which case you will see it for a few hours a night, barely above the horizon, in winter months).

The five brightest stars in Crux are usually called the Southern Cross, a pattern which is used on the national flags of a number of countries, including Australia and New Zealand.

Answer: Swan

It is obviously a bird, and the long neck should help you identify it as a swan. Although it seems to me that a goose would be just as good a description, the ancients had a nice myth (actually, several of them) to go along with calling it a swan. You can see Deneb, part of the Summer Triangle, near the centre of Cygnus. Deneb is one end of a shape called the Northern Cross, which is part of Cygnus.

Many find this easier to locate than Cygnus in its entirety.

Answer: Hercules

Herakles, as the Greeks called him, was constantly harassed by Hera, his stepmother. At one point, she induced him to kill his family in a frenzy, an act which he bitterly regretted when he came to his senses. She arranged for him to complete Twelve Labours as penance, then did her best to make them impossible for him.

He is shown in the constellation as kneeling, supposedly because he is in the midst of appealing to Zeus to help him defeat two giants in a battle that occurred after he had completed his tenth task.

Answer: Pegasus

Pegasus and Chrysaor were twins, born when Perseus decapitated their mother, who was pregnant to Poseidon, the god of horses and of the sea. Pegasus was captured by Bellerophon, who rode him to fight against the Chimera. When Bellerophon asked Pegasus to fly him to Olympus, the hero fell off and plummeted to earth (either because Zeus threw a thunderbolt to block the way, or because Pegasus bucked him off in deference to the wishes of the Olympian gods). Zeus turned Pegasus into a constellation, to fly through the night skies forever.

Answer: A seated woman

Cassiopeia was an Ethiopian queen, who bragged that she (or, in some versions, her daughter Andromeda) was more beautiful than the Nereids. As punishment, she and Andromeda were placed in the sky, where the throne in which she is half-sitting, half-reclining rotates around the North Star. For half the year, she is upside down (and looks like an M instead of a W), and must hang on for dear life lest she fall to the earth.