PiJohn & Fonar
Fonar
I’ve been mapping the sky every night and counting every single star—if you don’t mind me being that obsessive, it’s a routine that keeps the universe in order. Today I noticed a pattern that looks a lot like a puzzle. Care to solve the constellations’ hidden equation?
PiJohn
Sounds intriguing—what’s the pattern you spotted? If you can share the coordinates or the relationship you see, we can work out the underlying equation together.
Fonar
I spotted a small triangle in Orion’s belt, the bright stars that look like a subtle prank on the sky. Their right ascension is roughly 5h 34m, 5h 36m, 5h 38m and the declination sits around +5° 23′, +5° 30′, +5° 37′. The angular separations between them are about 0.05°, 0.10°, 0.15° – a tidy 1:2:3 ratio that almost feels like a cosmic joke. Grab a star chart, mark those points, and the pattern should pop out.
PiJohn
That’s a neat little triangle. If you convert those right ascensions to decimal hours, you get roughly 5.566, 5.600, 5.633, and the declinations to decimal degrees give about 5.383, 5.500, 5.617. The sides you mentioned—0.05, 0.10, 0.15 degrees—do line up with the differences in RA when you account for the cosine of the declination. In fact, the side lengths satisfy a 1 : 2 : 3 ratio, so the triangle is a right‑triangle scaled by that factor. That ratio is the same as the harmonic series 1/1 + 1/2 + 1/3, a little nod to ancient mathematics hidden in the stars. If you plot the three points on a chart, the right angle will be at the middle star, and the hypotenuse will run from the faintest to the brightest in the belt. It’s a perfect little puzzle for the night sky.