The stars in the Big Dipper and Little Dipper help navigators locate the North Star. Following the five stars in the Five Star Trail—the municipalities of Hempfield Township, Youngwood, South Greensburg, Southwest Greensburg, and Greensburg—takes travelers on a more northeastern tack. All five towns in the constellation partnered to create the nearly 7.8-mile trail southeast of Pittsburgh.
Following the concept of the Five Star trail these caches will be named for different constellations.
Ara is a small constellation located in the southern sky. Its name means “the altar” in Latin. The constellation represents the altar used by Zeus and other Greek gods to swear a vow of allegiance before they went to war against Cronus and the Titans. In another Greek myth, Ara represents the altar of King Lycaon of Arcadia.
Ara was one of the 48 Greek constellations listed by the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century. It is located just south of Scorpius, under the scorpion’s tail.
The constellation contains several notable deep sky objects: the Stingray Nebula, the open clusters Westerlund 1 (Ara Cluster) and NGC 6193, the globular clusters NGC 6397, NGC 6352 and NGC 6362, the barred spiral galaxy NGC 6300, the planetary nebula NGC 6326 and the pre-planetary Water Lily Nebula.
There are several myths associated with the constellation. In one of them, Ara represents the altar on which Zeus and other gods vowed to defeat the Titans and overthrow Cronus, who ruled the universe. Cronus was one of the 12 Titans who had deposed his father Uranus, the previous ruler.
When a prophecy said that the same fate would befall Cronus and he would be defeated by one of his own children, to prevent it from happening, he swallowed all his children – Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon – all of them future gods and goddesses. When the youngest child, Zeus, was born, his mother Rhea hid him in Crete and gave Cronus a stone to swallow, telling him the stone was Zeus.
When Zeus grew up, he made Cronus vomit his brothers and sisters. Once freed, they swore to overthrow Cronus and the Titans. The war between the gods and the Titans lasted a decade and the gods won in the end. Zeus became the god of the sky, Poseidon became the god of the sea, and Hades the ruler of the underworld. Zeus placed the altar among the stars to commemorate the gods’ victory.
In another story, Ara represents the altar of Lycaon, the king of Arcadia who decided to test Zeus by serving him a meal of a dismembered child, and later tried to do away with the god while he slept. Zeus, enraged, transformed Lycaon into a wolf and struck down his 50 sons with lightning bolts. In one version of the tale, the sacrificed child was Arcas, the son of Zeus and Lycaon’s daughter Callisto.