Centaurus

Centaurus's two brightest stars point observers to the Southern Cross in the Greek tradition. In the Andes, the same two stars are looking back at you: they are the eyes of Yacana, the llama.

Yacana is the largest of the Andean dark cloud constellations, read not from stars but from the black dust lanes that block the light of the Milky Way, a technique the Andes share with Aboriginal Australia and almost nowhere else, arrived at independently by both. Alpha and Beta Centauri, the same pair of stars the Greek tradition uses as pointers toward Crux, are read in this system as the llama's two eyes, with a smaller dark patch beside them read as her offspring.

The Huarochiri manuscript, the one substantial religious text written in Quechua during the colonial period, records that Yacana descends at midnight to drink from a spring, and that a person she descends upon will be fortunate; the same text warns that if she failed to drink, the world would flood. Her rising and setting through the year is tied directly to the herding calendar, one stage in an ordered sequence of animal figures, serpent, toad, tinamou, llama and fox, that functions as a working calendar rather than a set of separate resemblances.

Spanish colonial observers recorded the dark patches as native superstition without recognising a system was being shown to them, and the sequence was only properly documented in the twentieth century.

Centaurus is a large, bright southern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, representing a centaur, often identified with the wise Chiron, teacher of heroes. It contains two of the most notable stars in the sky: Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to the sun, whose faint companion Proxima Centauri is the nearest star of all, and the brilliant Beta Centauri; together they serve as pointers to the neighbouring Southern Cross. In myth the centaur is shown holding or spearing the neighbouring Lupus, the wolf or beast. In astronomical tradition the constellation is a star pattern rather than a zodiac sign, distinct from the separate figure of Sagittarius the archer-centaur on the ecliptic. These are the features of Centaurus as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological use of the region.

Several of Lacaille's eighteenth-century instrument constellations, Norma the level, Circinus the compasses, and Telescopium itself, were carved from the stars around Centaurus and Ara in the 1750s, so that a region of sky the classical tradition rendered as a single continuous mythological scene, centaur, beast and altar, now also carries the names of a set square, a pair of compasses and a telescope tucked into the gaps between the older figures.