Alexey Panferov/Alamy
The constellations are pictures we perceive by “connecting the dots” of random stars, but it seems incredible that we have two dippers in the night sky with similar shapes and proportions. Is this just a coincidence or is there an explanation? (continued)
Rachael Padman Newmarket, Suffolk, UK
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Australians are brought up to recognise a very obvious constellation known as “The Pot”, which is just a dipper with a short handle. This is also known in the northern hemisphere as “Orion”, where his belt forms the base of the pot and his sword the handle. Dippers don’t look like dippers when they are the wrong way up.
Incidentally, I was very confused when I first moved to the UK. I understood intellectually that the sun and moon would move the wrong way across the sky, but as someone who has always had a good directional sense, it took a long time to recover that.
It took me many months to realise exactly what I found so disturbing about the moon: it, too, was upside down. Once I grasped this, I could “see” the man in the moon for the first time in my life.
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