We were up in Scotland for a half-term holiday - where we had no internet access and hence no blogging for a week. It was a week of walks and sightseeing - including a snowball fight on one of our walks with the unseasonable weather up there!
I did manages to get some painting in - finishing off 3BG's of Seleucid pikemen (24 bases!) plus 8 bases of hoplites and 8 bases of theurophoroi as well as starting on the kataphracts / Companian cavalry / Thessalian cavalry and basic Greek horse - so my 'Greek' army is more than half way there (the peltasts are already completed).
We also took Junior's reflector telescope up with us - a bit of a waste of time as we only had one 'clear' night - but what a night!
We forget that living in or near cities prevents us from seeing many of the stars in the sky. I live near Liverpool and the bright orange glow that covers the night sky means that only the brightest stars can be seen. On a good night only a hundred odd stars can be seen thanks to streetlights burning away all through the night.
But in a Scottish cottage at the side of a loch, we could see only a few lights - mainly from the odd cottage or farmhouse on the hills opposite. Which meant that the sky was a deep black rather than bright orange. On that night I was literally blown away by the sight of hundreds of stars - bright, clean and some even reflected in the loch water. With a telescope I could see literally hundreds of thousands of stars. All the main constellations and their key stars could be easily seen and made out - Orion, Taurus, Gemini, Ursa Major etc. You could compare the redness of Betelgeuse with the blue white stars of Canis Minor. It was probably the first time I could see all the stars in the constellations and make out the patterns they made (back home, some of the fainter stars in a constellation can't be seen).
Which made me think about how the ancients would have viewed them. No wonder they had such an effect on ancient cultures and civilizations - such a clear view made a big impression on me! What about people - like the Greeks and Romans - who really didn't understand too much about what they were seeing and tried to make some sense of what they were presented with each night.
No wonder they tried to attribute some sense of order to them - the patterns of the constellations for example. What else could we expect?
Funnily enough, I've just finished reading a book about the Roman's on Hadrian's Wall and thought about the Roman guards on sentry duty at night looking at the same stars in the same dark sky from a spot only 100 or so miles from where we were - and maybe as awed as I was!