Yoga Poses Constellations

Posted on by Georgios Varnavides One min read
Yoga post constellation projected on the night sky
Yoga pose constellation, classified using a convolutional neural network.

At its first meeting in 1922, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), officially adopted the list of 88 constellations that we use today. These include 14 men and women, 9 birds, two insects, 19 land animals, 10 water creatures, two centaurs, one head of hair, a serpent, a dragon, a flying horse, a river and 29 inanimate objects. As many of us have (frustratingly) witnessed first hand while star-gazing - most of these bear little resemblance to their supposed figures. Instead, it is more likely that the ancient constellation-makers meant them to be symbolic, a kind of celestial “Hall of Fame” for their favorite animals or heroes.

This begs two questions I sought to answer with this old post of mine on Wolfram Community:

  1. Can we ‘do better’ with Wolfram Language’s StarData[] curated data and Machine Learning functionality?
  2. What if the ancient constellation-makers were slightly more creative? Say they looked up at the sky, and only saw yoga-poses!