Starwatch: fishing for Pisces

Starwatch chart 26 November 2018 - pisces

This week is a good time to spot one of the fainter zodiacal constellations, Pisces. The chart shows the view facing south at 20:00 GMT on 26 November. The V-shaped constellation represents a pair of fish dangling from a cord (although the fish point diagonally upwards from our northern vantage point). The constellation is composed of only faint stars and can most easily be located by first finding the body of Pegasus, which is represented by a large square of four stars. Pisces then follows around the eastern and southern sides. This grouping of stars has long been associated with fish, although it has also been seen as a goddess, a bird and, rather unglamorously, a fence around a pig enclosure. It is one of the twelve zodiacal constellations, which means that it lies on the path that the sun takes through the sky during the year. This path is known as the ecliptic and the sun happens to be in Pisces during March, which means that in the autumn the sun is far away on the opposite side of the sky, and we see Pisces in the darkest possible sky.