 Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. In this week's Astronomy of Other Cultures, we are going to look at Chinese astronomy and specifically look at the constellations of the ancient Chinese. So let's take a look at these, and what we see is that those Chinese constellations were more numerous than those in Western society, and they were also far smaller consisting of fewer stars. So here we see a few of those, in fact the regions around the North Pole, which was very prominent, the northern polar constellations, those that remained up above the horizon at all times were very important in Chinese culture. Now there were a total of 283 groupings, so as comparison as to what we see here, 283. Now just for comparison, our current constellations that we use in astronomy today are a total of 88, and that is what has been defined by the international astronomical union. Now the Chinese divided these into groups, and in fact there were five groups, and four of those here, the four that were done by the early Chinese, were the Azure Dragon in the East, the Black Tortoise in the North, the White Tiger in the West, and the Vermilion Bird in the South. Now that makes four groupings, the fifth group was the Southern stars, those that would not be visible from China. So once traveled beyond and new stars became visible, then additional stars would have been added in, but those are the ones that were not prominent and could not be seen from China. Now these 28 mansions were then divided into seven groupings, so each of these along one of the constellations, and you can see in the image here, let's take a look at this next one as an older version of this, now we can see how there are seven groupings in each, so there were seven in one direction, seven here, seven here, and seven here making those 28 groupings, each associated with one of these four creatures. Now there were also different enclosures, so in the Northern sky there were three enclosures, the northernmost would be the purple forbidden enclosure, which concluded those very important circumpolar stars, and those were then associated with the emperor and the people and things close to the emperor, so other members of the royal family and high advisors and aides would have been associated with those stars in that purple forbidden enclosure, so again those were the very important stars in Chinese culture. Why? Because they were the ones that always stayed up above the horizon. Now we see how that's different in Western culture, when we look at Western culture in the constellations, our prominent constellations are those along the ecliptic or the path of the sun, so those at the sun, moon, and planets pass through over the course of the year, and we're seeing that very different in Chinese culture where the most important stars were those ones closest to the pole. So let's go ahead and finish up with our summary, and what we've looked at is, first of all, the constellations of China were smaller and more numerous than the traditional Western constellations. The sky was divided into 28 mansions around the ecliptic and the three enclosures of the northern sky, including the forbidden enclosure right along the area of those circumpolar stars. Those southern stars, again those that are not visible from China, were added in later as a fifth group. So that concludes this lecture on the Chinese constellations. We'll be back again next week for another Astronomy of Other Cultures, so until then, have a great day everyone, and I will see you in class.