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Catch Taurus and the Pleiades this weekend just after sunset � before they
vanish for summer. Find Orion on the south-western horizon, then look
westward, on the same level as his shoulders, to find the red star Aldebaran,
the Bull's Eye, and west the same amount again to find the Pleiades. How many
you see depends on your eyesight. Most people see six.
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I like tracing the constellations at night. And I like to think of the people
thousands of years before me who have done exactly the same thing. The usual
view is that astronomy and astrology go back more than 4,000 years � but new
research now dates star maps back to 15,000 BC.
Dr Michael Rappengluck, of the University of Munich, has studied the famous
cave paintings at Lascaux, in France. One painting of a bull has a highly s
ignificant group of dots by its shoulder, in the same arrangement as the
Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, group of stars. This cluster appears in native
art worldwide. If Lascaux's dots are indeed the Pleiades, then the bull must
be the one we still call Taurus. Cave painters observed the Moon, too.
Rappengluck has identified painted dots in sets of 13 and 29; there are 13
days between first seeing a new moon and the night it is at its fullest; and
29 days between successive full moons. Our ancestors were smarter than they
have been given credit for.
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