Releases in 2026
Technical Topics
In the first months of 2026, WGSN has discussed some technical topics.
First, it took us some time to understand the proposals from the Balinese sky culture of the Palelintangan, a cultural calendar that was adopted on Bali (Indonesia) by deriving it from Hindu traditions short after the first Indians arrived around 700 CE. We collate the identifications of constellations by ethnographers of the last century and the living tradition (priests on Bali), and aim to represent constellations with any representative star inside the constellation area. As historical constellations don’t have boundaries, we represent their areas with convex hulls of stick figure-like drawn images of the identified stars.
Second, we decided to consider names now constellationwise, looking at come of the constellations that are currently up in the (northern) sky. We focus on the northern sky first to give our members more time to study the southern sky cultures. The cultures in Eurasia are much better documented, so we start using these names first and will return to the same areas in the sky yearly to include more and more indigenous names.