Today’s culture offers us plenty of celebrities who are famous just for being famous. Everybody knows about them even if they’re not especially talented or even bright. The night sky offers a few of those celebrities as well — constellations that aren’t especially bright or easy to spot, but that are famous nonetheless. A prime example is Aries, the ram. It’s low in the east at nightfall and soars high across the south in late evening. It’s a faint pattern marked by only a couple of moderately bright stars: Hamal, its brightest, and Sheratan, its second-brightest. There’s not much around the stars to point them out, though, so you might want a star chart to find them. Aries is famous not because of its brilliance, but because of its location — it’s one of the constellations of the zodiac. These constellations all lie along the Sun’s path across the sky. In ancient times, that gave them special significance. Aries was the most significant of all. At the time the constellations were name
