constellations

I am briefly on this mailing list because the conversation about the possible constellations and such is quite intriguing, and I had some ideas. A friend of mine on this list brought the conversation to my attention! I'm an astronomer by trade and by hobby, so naturally, I thought I'd have a stab at contributing. These are quotes from mdriussi:

Well, stars don't really come in "pink", but if the star is significantly red, such as an older star or a smaller K or M dwarf, it will have a reddish tinge. You'd need to know its size before you could determine this. If the star is in fact pink, well, that's a really different universe.

This could be a play on the region inside of Cygnus, the Swan, whose "head", a star called Albireo, is actually a double star, and whose body lies in a portion of the Milky Way which has a dark smudgey area of obscuring dust known as the Rift. This dark swatch combined with the double star might be the reference here.

Could be like the Pleiades, where there are six visible stars, one of which is very dim and difficult to make out. Thus, they are five very bright white stars close together in a bundle. This is a dominant night sky icon in many cultures, including Japan where it is called Subaru.

Could be a naked-eye, star forming region like the Orion Nebula (mark's idea). Or any good open cluster, like M44 the Beehive.

Maybe Mars, because it is so dull and red.

This is likely a pun on Coma Berenices, or Berenice's Hair, the flowing hair of a woman named Bernice as seen in the constellation of many stars in the northern sky.

We were thinking this might be like Centaurus, the centaur, who would indeed have "beared legs".

Could be a very blue star like Rigel or Sirius. Well, there's my two cents, Tania Ruiz Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics