Two nights ago I did another Winter Learning Journey activity for more free time. Currently, I am on 55 minutes of free time, with 11 activities done and 9 to go. This activity had to be done in the night because it is star gazing. This activity simply told me to go outside on a clear night and look up. It also said to draw it, connect the dots and make up a myth about my star shape. At around midnight, I did this activity with a few clouds and enough stars for a constellation. Using an app called Sky View, suggested by this task, I was able to identify only 1 constellation which is the Southern Cross. In the app, the southern cross is known as Crux, which is the Latin word for cross. This constellation is found under the part of the Centaurus constellation, nicknamed The Pointers for it’s brightness in the sky. When I was star gazing, some of the clouds were covering the bottom star of the Southern Cross. I made my picture using Kleki and Google Drawings.
My myth for my star shape.
A person was at sea in the southern hemisphere with his triplet. He had no way of navigation except the knowledge of nature as it was tens of thousands of years ago. In the day, it was the sun. In the night, it was the stars.
In the Formosan tongue of their ancestors, the Southern Cross was called something meaning “southern marker.” But fog often veiled the stars, hiding the faintest one and turning the cross into a crooked hill. The nearby constellations, the Diamond Cross and the False Cross, added to the confusion, but the brightest two stars forming the Pointers above the Southern Cross remained faithful guides.
One night, with the moon low in the west, he aligned the ship to the left of the moon where the Pointers glowed, and beneath them, the incomplete Southern Cross. He longed to know why one star was always missing, but the sea kept its secrets.
That night, he dreamed: he and his sons discovered an island where they unearthed two pure gold nuggets, yellow and gleaming like fire, as large as ostrich eggs. As his sons lifted one of them, suddenly a rope coiled around his waist but he had no sword to cut it. A nightmare-creature stirred in the deep was guarding the sea’s treasure.
At dawn, the stars faded, but three of the Southern Cross remained, sketching the shape of an island. By afternoon, they reached a real island and he named it Samoa. Its hills mirrored the star pattern, the missing star a valley. The Pointers? They marked the blowholes. And the monster? Just whales, breaching in the surf. The gold? That was real. That was the beauty.
This myth that I made had been retouched by Microsoft Copilot AI. I took some screenshots of the constellations in Sky View in the position that I saw the Pointers and Southern Cross in the night sky in front of our house. I didn’t get to take an actual photo because normal cameras can’t capture the stars in the dark sky.
If you use Sky View, can you identify any constellations in front of your house on a not so cloudy night?
