Southern Skies and Southern Quarters

The southern sky as seen from the northern hemisphere is the part that rises and sets rather than circling the pole, and the stars nearest the southern horizon are those that appear only briefly, which gave several traditions a sense of the south as the quarter of transience. There is no bright southern pole star corresponding to Polaris, and the region around the south celestial pole was invisible to Mediterranean, Mesopotamian and Chinese astronomers, which is why the southern constellations are almost all early modern inventions named by European navigators. In the Golden Dawn scheme the south is assigned to fire, and in Hindu ritual the south is the direction faced in offerings to the ancestors. In the Islamic world a mosque north of Mecca faces south, so for a large population the qibla and the southern quarter coincide, again by geography rather than by symbolism.

The systematic European charting of the southern sky's previously unrecorded constellations began in earnest with the German astronomer Johann Bayer's star atlas Uranometria (1603), which incorporated twelve new southern constellations based on observations made by the Dutch navigators Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman during voyages to the East Indies in the 1590s; the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille later added a further fourteen southern constellations following his own observations from the Cape of Good Hope in the 1750s.