Our interesting stars in Vedic Astronomy!

During March 2020 lockdown blissfully clear sky, had opportunity to learn how to use gcam (google cam app) to capture the night sky in astro-photography mode. Truly thankful and grateful for the same, I could start with mini projects on stars and constellations and posted them on social media initially.

With request from friends outside social media, started documenting every day’s capture in a dedicated blogspot page — https://skydurga.blogspot.com/2020/05/orion-consetllation.html

But much of those documentations are in tandem with the already existing popular narrative. While mapping the constellations with Tamil/Sanskrit star names it is interesting to note that each of these Nakshatra actually represents a star, a binary star, a star mansion or even an asterism and not a single star always.

Various stars in the moon path and a few others were given proper names many thousand years ago. Some notable proper names from veda’s assigned to stars are the 27 or 28 daily stars Ashwini to Revati, the saptarishis (Ursa major for Rishis Marichi,Vasishta,Angirasa,Atri,Puslastya,Pulaha,Karatu or Gautama, Bhardwaja, Vishvamitra, Kashyapa, Jamdagni, Vasishtha and Atri), Dhruva (Polaris) and Arundhati.

The thousands of year old lunar almanac system is an integral part of traditional Vedic culture, where we probably have a birth horoscope where in an important parameter is the birth Nakshatra and birth Rashi.

To understand each star mapping and how they were already captured in Vedic Astronomy, let us start to see one star at a time and cover the mapping between tamil/sanskrit star names, their corresponding rashi and their zodiac equivalent in the coming days :-) Hope you enjoy them along with me!