What does the star officer mean?

Star officials are the product of the combination of ancient China mythology and astronomy. In order to facilitate the identification and observation of stars, astronomers in ancient China formed a group of stars, and each group was named after something on the ground. This group is called star officials, or simply officials. After the Tang and Song Dynasties, it was also called the balcony. However, this constellation does not contain the meaning of starry sky division, which is different from the constellation concept mentioned today. Chen Zhuo in the Three Kingdoms merged three star officials, namely Shi, Gan and Wu Xian, to form a 283-star official system of * *1465, which was used by later astronomers.

The ancient star official system in China divided the night sky into three walls and twenty-eight nights. The ancients looked up at the stars overhead in the evening of the vernal equinox near the intersection of Huangchi and Jiaojiao, and divided twenty-eight huts into four sections according to the four directions of southeast, northwest and northwest. Each section corresponds to an elephant, and each section contains seven nights: the bird elephant is in the south, the dragon elephant and the tiger elephant are in the east and west respectively, and the tortoise and snake are hidden under the north horizon. In ancient times, the popular theory of five elements and five colors was that blue, red, yellow, white and black were matched with east, south, middle, west and north respectively, and finally the theory of oriental black dragon, western white tiger, southern suzaku (bird) and northern Xuanwu (tortoise and snake) was formed.

Ancient astronomy in China has its own method of distinguishing and dividing the star regions, which is different from the western method of dividing the zodiac. In ancient astronomy in China, the system of "star officials" similar to western "constellations" was used. The most systematic method was to divide 1464 stars in the sky into "283 officials". In ancient China, the system of "star officials" divided the sky into "three walls and twenty-eight lodges" and other star officials. (The records of star officials in the existing ancient books first appeared in Records of the Historian Tianguan's Biography, and "283 officials" included such star officials as "Three Walls" and "Twenty-eight Accommodations".