Piscis Australis

The Southern Fish

PISCIS AUSTRALIS
THE SOUTHERN FISH

 

 

AQUARIUS is so closely identified with the constellation Piscis Australis, or the “Southern Fish,” situated directly south of it, that a description of this asterism is worthy of notice in this place.

Piscis Australis, says Burritt, is supposed to have taken its name from the transformation of Venus into the shape of a fish, when she fled terrified at the horrible advances of the monster Typhon. It has been thought that the Southern Fish was the sky symbol of the god Dagon of the Syrians, the Phagre and Oxyrinque adored in Egypt, and it has even been associated with the still greater Oannes. It was especially mentioned by Avienus as the “Greater Fish,” and Longfellow in the notes to his translation of the Divine Comedy, called it the “Golden Fish.”

The Mosaicists held the asterism to represent the Barrel of Meal belonging to Sareptha’s widow, but Schickard pronounces it to be the Fish taken by St. Peter with a piece of money in its mouth.

Aratos describes the figure as “on his back the Fish,” but it generally appears in an upright position with mouth agape, drinking in the great stream which flows down the sky from the water-jar of Aquarius.

In the early legends the Southern Fish was the parent of the Northern and Western Fishes that make up the zodiacal constellation Pisces.

This constellation as a whole is inconspicuous in this hemisphere owing to its low position. Its lucida however, the brilliant first magnitude star Fomalhaut, rises well above the horizon and adorns the southern skies in the early evening during the autumn months. Fomalhaut is made the more conspicuous because it is the brightest star in this region of the sky. It is the farthest south of all the first magnitude stars we see, and ranks thirteenth among the brilliant stars in our hemisphere.

Mrs. Martin11 thus refers to this great sun: “On early acquaintance the loneliness of the star, added to the sombre signs of approaching autumn, sometimes gives one a touch of melancholy, but its aspect when more familiar soon comes to suggest only sweetness and serenity, and a lover of Fomalhaut feels that a sustaining light has gone when, during the last of December, this beautiful star sinks gently down in the south-west and disappears from the evening sky not to return for more than seven months.”

Fomalhaut is always associated in the mind of the star lover with Capella, the brilliant in the constellation Auriga, which rises far from it over the north-eastern horizon. As these two stars rise almost simultaneously, one naturally turns from a glimpse of one to the bright beams of the other.

The name Fomalhaut, pronounced F-mal-, is from the Arabic, meaning “the Fish’s Mouth.” Aratos mentions it as “ One large and bright by both the Pourer’s feet.” Among the early Arabs, Fomalhaut was known as “the First Frog.”

Flammarion tells us that Fomalhaut was known as “Hastorang” in Persia 3000 B.C., when near the winter solstice. It was also called “the magnificent Royal Star,” and was one of the four Royal stars of astrology, ruling over the four cardinal points of the heavens, the other stars being Regulus, Antares, and Aldebaran. These four stars were also regarded as the four guardians of Heaven, sentinels watching over the other stars.

About 500 B.C. Fomalhaut was the object of sunrise worship in the temple of Demeter at Eleusis. With astrologers it portended eminence, fortune, and power. Its position in the heavens has been determined with the greatest possible accuracy to enable navigators to find their longitude at sea, and it appears in the Ephemerides of all modern sea-going nations. It culminates at 9 P.M., on the 25th of October.

Fomalhaut is reddish in colour, and distant from the earth about twenty-one light years. So far as is known it has no companion. By one authority this star was thought to be the Central Sun of the Universe, and according to Allen no other star seems to have had so varied an orthography.