This week we will track down Pisces, the fishes. Despite being one of the largest zodiacal constellations, it can be surprisingly difficult to identify because it contains no bright stars.<\/p>\n
The chart shows the view looking east from London at 10pm on Monday. As the week progresses, the bright waning moon will rise later and later in the evening, allowing the faint stars of Pisces to be more easily seen.<\/p>\n
Start by finding the Great Square of Pegasus. Look below its southern edge for a small, faint ring of stars. This is the Circlet of Pisces. Seven stars make up the pattern, although you will not see them all from a semi-urban location.<\/p>\n
The circlet represents one of the two fish. From here, a long string of faint stars heads to Alrescha, an Arabic name meaning \u201cthe cord\u201d. Another string leads to the second fish, forming a V-shape of stars.<\/p>\n
Pisces is one of the second-century astronomer Ptolemy\u2019s original 48 constellations. In Greek mythology, the fishes were associated with Aphrodite and her son Eros, who escaped the monster Typhon by taking the form of fish. They tied themselves together so they would not become separated.<\/p>\n
From the southern hemisphere, Pisces is also well placed in the evening, appearing higher in the sky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This week we will track down Pisces, the fishes. Despite being one of the largest zodiacal constellations, it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":908306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-908305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=908305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/908306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=908305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=908305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=908305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}