Science Café: Beyond the Stars (Apr 2025)

At the April 2025 edition of Science Café held as part of this year's Dot in Space festival, participants created their own constellations and marvelled at how the stars have guided people across different cultures for centuries.

Comparision of cultural representations of the Orion constellation across Thai, Greek, and Javanese traditions. Illustration credits: Ai Xin Qin.

Did you know early Arab sailors navigated the seas using just a piece of wood with string in the middle (a tool called a kamal) and their knowledge of trigonometry and stellar positions? Or that many Asian cultures have age-old constellation legends just as fascinating as Greek astrology?

Science Centre Singapore's latest Science Café session, "Beyond the Stars: Science, Culture and the Cosmos", introduced attendees to the wonders of the study of the night sky, from the history of the development of astronomical instruments to the cultural significance of the stars.

Held on Saturday 12 April 2025 from 2:00pm-4:00pm at Singapore Science Park as part of this year's Dot in Space festival, the event featured two distinguished speakers: Dr Abel Yang, Senior Lecturer at the National University of Singapore's Department of Physics, and Mr Meng Hwee Lim, Senior Science Educator at Science Centre Singapore.

Science Café is a ticketed monthly informal talk series organised by Science Centre Singapore for adults 18 years old and above to discuss various hot science topics over dinner and drinks. This alcohol-free, kid-friendly special edition of Science Café brought the programme's fun, casual science chats to families and the general public excited to blast off into outer space. 

Hosted at the main stage, the public session was one of several space science-related activities at Dot in Space 2025, from an exhibition showcasing stunning satellite imagery of Earth and a build-your-own-satellite station, to a live planetarium show and interactive star constellations. 

Attendees constructing a satellite paper craft at Dot in Space 2025. Photo credits: Science Centre Singapore

The Science Café session kicked off with an icebreaker for audience members to design and name their very own constellation using big sheets of papers with a star map print-out. Participants proposed various entertaining constellations, from dinosaurs to lamps and Pokémon-inspired creations. 

Science Café attendees drawing their own constellations. Photo credits: Science Centre Singapore.

Dr. Yang's talk focused on the science of astrometry and stellar positioning. Using the main stage's screen to project a planetarium software showing the night sky, he brought the audience along on a virtual tour to explain how stars have held practical meaning for navigation, agriculture, and calendar systems for different cultures throughout history. 

For instance, while the Orion constellation is known as a hunter in Greek mythology, Dr. Yang explained that in Java, the Orion constellation is represented as a plough because the constellation’s appearance in December signals the beginning of the planting season.  "At the end of the planting season," due to the passage of time and the Earth's motion, the celestial plough "will be on the other side of the sky ... [and] be upside down" like a real-life plough with its tools laid out to dry after a hard day of farming.

Dr. Abel Yang presenting at Science Café: Beyond the Stars: Science, Culture and the Cosmos. Photo credits: Science Centre Singapore.

Dr. Yang also explained how early navigators would use Polaris (also known as the North Star) to plot maps based on latitude prior to the advent of magnetic compasses and satellites. 

For a quick gauge of how high Polaris was above the horizon, people stretched out their arms and stuck out their finger to estimate the degree of elevation since the space between "the bottom of your finger to the top of your finger ... measures about one and a half degree[s]," Dr. Yang said.

By keeping Polaris "at the same level, same position every night," early Arab sailors could "sail from Arabia to India, and later on from India to Southeast Asia." 

Rather than guess the elevation using their hands, Arab sailors invented an elegantly simple navigational tool called the kamal: a flat, rectangular wooden board with a knotted string attached in the centre. The string was knotted so that “one knot [measured] basically one finger's angle, one and a half degrees.” By stretching the string from one’s chin and aligning the top of the kamal with Polaris and the bottom edge with the horizon, sailors could sail accurately to where they wanted to go.

A diagram showing how Arab sailors used the kamal, a celestial navigation device. Photograph insert by Bordwall, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Illustration credits: Ai Xin Qin.

To complement Dr. Yang's scientific overview of how the stars were used as guideposts for navigation, agriculture, and calendars, the next talk by Mr. Meng Hwee Lim explored cultural myths around constellations in Asia. Although the International Astronomy Union officially recognizes 88 constellations mostly rooted in Greco-Roman mythology, Mr. Meng Hwee Lim's presentation delved into star stories from Asian perspectives. 

Mr. Meng Hwee Lim presenting at Science Café: Beyond the Stars: Science, Culture and the Cosmos. Photo credits: Science Centre Singapore.

For example, in Thailand, the Orion constellation is seen as a turtle, instead of the huntsman of Greek mythology or plough in Javanese culture. After the talk, Mr. Lim shared another example of a constellation imagined in two different ways: Scorpius, represented as a scorpion in Greco-Roman tradition, that is regarded as a demi-god’s fish hook in Polynesian culture.

Mr. Lim went on to share some examples of enduring Asian star stories, referencing an open-source book Stars of Asia: Myths and Legends of Stars and the Universe, loved by Asian people published by a group of researchers across Asia. 

Some of the memorable myths the Senior Science Educator shared include the famous story of the Weaver Girl and Cowherd, found in countries such as Japan, China, Korea, and Vietnam. 

According to ancient Chinese lore, two lovers, an immortal woman and a mortal man symbolizing the stars Vega and Altair are separated by a heavenly river—the Milky Way—and are only permitted to reunite on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, when a flock of magpies create a bridge for the lovers to meet. 

While the Pleiades star cluster is often represented as a story of seven sisters in the West, a captivating tale from Thailand instead characterizes the Pleiades constellation as a mother hen and her six chicks. The noble animals choose to sacrifice themselves as food for a hungry monk, transforming the Western themes of grief and sisterhood into a Buddhist reincarnation moralizing tale.

From celestial navigation tools to Asian folklore, this Science Café gave attendees a taste of astronomy. If you're curious to expand your knowledge of the night sky, come down to Science Centre Singapore's Observatory for stargazing and digital planetarium live shows every 1st, 2nd and 4th Friday of the month from 7:30-10:00pm, unless otherwise stated (weather permitting). Tickets are available here. 

Dot in Space 2025 was organised by Science Centre Singapore and Singapore Science Park, and supported by The Office for Space Technology & Industry (OSTin) and Spaceytales. 

Written by Jamie Uy

Published 16 May 2025