What the languages of South Asia call the sky

An atlas in two halves, over one sky. The first records the sky as it was named: 1084 star names in 57 languages, every one cited to the page of its source, beside 188 Sanskrit names attested in the classical texts. The second records the sky as it is being observed: what is up right now, where the gravitational waves came from, and what the instruments built in India keep finding.

The named sky

Most Indian languages inherited the twenty-seven Sanskrit nakshatra names and adapted them. A table of those adaptations would be large and nearly uninformative. So every name here carries a register — whether a language formed it itself, uses it colloquially, carries it from a distinct Adivasi tradition, or took it from Sanskrit — and separating those layers is what the compilation is for.

Most-named things in the sky

• Ursa Major (the Big Dipper)
  96 names in 34 languages
• The Pleiades
  87 names in 41 languages
• The Milky Way
  74 names in 39 languages
• The lunar mansions as a system
  69 names in 15 languages
• Orion
  61 names in 27 languages
• Meteors and shooting stars
  45 names in 33 languages
• Comets
  45 names in 30 languages
• Ursa Minor
  45 names in 26 languages

All 118 sky objects →

Best-attested languages

• Marathi
  64 names
• Tamil
  62 names
• Telugu
  57 names
• Kolami
  43 names
• Kannada
  41 names
• Mizo (Lushai)
  38 names
• Malayalam
  36 names
• Sindhi
  34 names

All cultures →

The classical tradition

The Sanskrit compilation is separate: 188 names from the Vedas, the Sūrya Siddhānta, the Purāṇas and the lexicons, each with the śloka that attests it, a published translation and a citation. Browse the Sanskrit stars →

The sky as it is now

The modern half is curation of the same discipline — a bounded record, every entry cited to something a reader can open. Where the named sky letters the stars with what was seen from here, this one letters them with what is being found from here.

• Now in the sky
  2 things bright enough and new enough to be worth pointing a phone at tonight — each with its position, its discoverer and the notice that announced it. Entries leave the list when they fade; their pages stay.
• Gravitational waves
  5 mergers, each drawn as the patch of sky it might have come from — the only pages here that give no coordinates, because a wave has none: a region is the whole of what was measured.
• The modern Indian record
  10 discoveries made with instruments built and run from India — pulsars at the GMRT, AstroSat's high-energy sky — each cited to the paper that announced it. A layer of the app's Modern sky, refreshed from this domain.

Reading the sky

• Five stars the texts kept watching
  Rohiṇī's Cart, Arundhatī, Agastya, Dhruva and the Seven Sages — omen-site, eye test, season bell, pivot and calendar, every claim quoted verbatim.
• The sky that moved
  The Pleiades rose due east once, a 28th star fell out of the calendar, and the solstice changed its month — precession as the texts recorded it.
• The shadow explained
  From Svarbhānu piercing the sun to the earth's shadow computed — the Indian eclipse from myth to mechanism, register by register.
• The instruments
  A stick, a bowl of water, a bowl for rain, and a globe that turns itself — the four instruments the texts specify, down to the aperture and the fill.
• The cup that refills
  The moon as the sky's account-book: drunk and refilled, named for its missing night, sixteen parts with one fixed — and at last a mirror of the earth.
• The wanderers
  The planets stray, stop, and go backwards — one word for the loop, and every register that uses it, from war-omen to the eightfold speeds.
• The smoke-bannered
  The comet obeys nothing — so the texts drew a boundary: 'not by computation', an exclusion list, and a log of station, smoke, colour and days.
• The sphere that turns
  Two spheres over your head, and only one of them turns: kha is space, bha is the star, and the texts revolve the bhagola — which is what the atlas is named for.
• The nothing that counts
  The zero's whole career: an empty place, an algorithm's marker, a dot — then a number with rules, whose division names the infinite.
• The sum without end
  π from Āryabhaṭa's 'approached' to the Kerala series two and a half centuries before Leibniz — precision bought term by term, with no last term.
• The pulverizer and the wheel
  The kuṭṭaka grinds calendar questions to integers; the cakravāla turns it against Pell's equation — Fermat's challenge, solved five centuries early.
• Where should it fall?
  Why the earth doesn't fall: wind-cords, the self-supported globe, and Bhāskara's power of attraction with the symmetry argument — the slot gravity later fills.

Two ways to see the whole of it at once

• The sky chart
  Every object on one map, filtered by language or by register. Turn the borrowed names off and what is left is what the languages made themselves.
• The coverage matrix
  118 objects against 57 languages, each cell coloured by the least-borrowed name in it — and the empty cells honestly meaning no source was found.

Seeing them

The atlas has a companion app, Bhagol: Indian Sky Map — for Android and iPhone — which points a phone at the sky and labels what is up there. It carries both halves as identities: the Indian sky letters the stars in the language and register you choose and draws the attested figures over them; the Modern sky letters the same stars with their IAU names, Bayer designations and distances, and carries the record, the transients and the waves. Nearly every page here can open the app at the thing it describes — a shared link lands in the app when it is installed, and on these pages when it is not.