Every culture that ever lived under a clear sky drew its own pictures among the stars — and, watching the very same stars, they kept arriving at the same handful of landmarks: the Pleiades, red Antares, the belt of Orion, the Southern Cross.
SCOB Night-Sky has a page for each of eleven of those traditions. This page lines them up on a single thread of time — from the oldest continuous star-knowledge on Earth to the modern IAU — and lets you pick a bright star and hear every name it has ever been given, resolved live from the culture pages' own data.
Choose a bright star to see what each tradition on this site calls it — computed live from the same coordinates the culture pages use.
Look at the star names on any modern chart and you are reading a 4,000-year relay. Babylon drew the first zodiac and the figures of the ecliptic. The Greeks inherited those figures and fixed 48 constellations in Ptolemy's Almagest (c. 150 CE). When that book was translated into Arabic, scholars kept the Greek figures but attached their own star names — and added the astronomy of the manāzil, the Moon's mansions.
Centuries later the Arabic Almagest was translated on into Latin Europe, and the Arabic star names came with it, often garbled by copyists: Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Altair, Deneb, Vega, Fomalhaut, Algol. In 1922 the IAU fixed the 88 constellations we use today, and in 2016 its Working Group on Star Names began standardising the spellings — most of them still Arabic, worn smooth by that thousand-year journey. The star explorer above is that relay, made clickable.
Cultural names and the star coordinates are drawn live from this site's own culture-page data files via the shared sky-culture-core.js cross-link engine; where a tradition drew no figure on a star, it is omitted. Era dates are approximate and, for oral traditions, deliberately broad. This is a synthesis page — each claim is developed on the individual culture pages linked in the timeline. Science Centre Observatory, Singapore.