Southern Cross Constellation & the Golden Ratio

[FFoster6]

Hi I’m a student and just came across this observation so here goes…

:question:I was studying the Golden Mean / Golden Proportion / Phi (whatever you want to call it) and I was looking at the half section of a shell which is regularly used to explain the golden proportion. To stylise the shell I started putting dots along its spiral curve and then I noticed that the dots that were placed converging towards the centre of the shell spiral looked like the Southern Cross constellation.

I got a pic of the Southern Cross and compared it to the proportions in the shell spiral and it looks as though its stars are exactly scaled and could fit along the curve of the shell which is supposed to be a Fibonnachi curve.

I would really appreciate if any of you (more experienced in maths and astronomy than me – probably all of you), in this forum could please check this out. I will try to upload a pic of the spiral shell with the dots.

Maybe I haven’t looked at this correctly but from what I see it sure looks awesome. I love looking at the stars and everything around me. The universe and our world is beautifully made!

Thank you for any time/effort you could spare to provide some answers to this observation.

Fiona Foster

[Octane]

If you look at enough stars, you'll make out all sorts of shapes and what not.

A lot of them are referred to as asterisms. The Southern Cross is an asterism in itself.

In a few hundred (or thousand) years, the stars would have moved further apart (or closer) to each other, and the Southern Cross, as we know it today, will cease to exist.

H

[FFoster6]

Hey thanks for your reply -
I'll be sad on that day... but depends on where I'll be viewing it (the SC) from, I guess... who knows what tomorrow may bring...

[mental4astro]

Following on from H's note, our mind hard wired to look for familiar patterns. That is why we see "horses" in cloud formations, alphanumeric figures in the lunar craters (the famous lunar "X" for one), and curious looking arrangements in stellar asterisms.

The Southern Cross is nothing more than a line of sight coincidence from our position in the Milky Way. And this is also only because of our Judao-Christian background. Other cultures that don't have the Christian cross as a cultural figure see this asterism representing another thing. Some Australian Aboriginal cultures see this collection of stars as a sting ray. No golden proportion here. Just a sting ray.

Nothing more than a coincidence of line of sight. Jump into a spacecraft and move in any direction several light years away from where we are now, and the "southern cross" asterism also ceases to exist as the component stars will be in a different arrangement as these stars are all different distances to us, so their apparition as an asterism will be altered in the three dimensions that we move in.

Alex.

[mental4astro]

Ahhh, but other asterisms will be forming to recaptivate our imagination! Exactly right!
:)

[Terry B]

The stars are a very good example of random patterns. Even the things we identify like the southern cross are dodgy shapes. The southern cross is a pretty warped cross. It I asked a carpenter to build me a cross and it came back the shape in the stars I think I would be looking for another carpenter.
Orions belt is not very straight and there are almost no other straight lines of 3 or more naked eye stars. Real shapes are not there, just random patterns.

[joe_smith]

There is a good animation on you-tube (if you haven't already seen it) called Nature by Numbers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkGeOWYOFoA) its pretty good at showing how the Golden Ratio (golden spiral) works in nature on earth, but I haven't seen any examples of the Golden Ratio (golden spiral) in the universe.

[Osirisra]

I'd imagine some spiral galaxies could have the golden ratio.