matthen:

I would call it The Plough, you might know it as The Big Dipper- or even The Celestial Bureaucrat. It’s a particularly helpful constellation for navigation, as it can help us folk in the northern hemisphere find Polaris, the North Star. Everyday it moves in the sky due to the spinning of the Earth, but on much longer time scales it is doing something a lot more amazing. To our very earliest ancestors, it would have looked quite different- as all the stars in our Galaxy are moving- in general spinning around the galactic spiral’s centre. A good reminder that the Universe is really a very dynamic place. [more]