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Stars identification in Indian astronomical texts; star names; Dvijesvara; $Nrp\bar{a}da; Torana; Asvamukha; southern stars listed from India.

In our effort to decipher the words and identify the stars as cited in the text Sarvasiddh$\bar{a}$ntar$\bar{a}$jaby Nity$\bar{\rm a}$nanda of 15th century, we have found that most of the stars near the ecliptic belt are easily identifiable. The coordinate system used is Dhruvaka and Viksepa, which differ from the currently used ecliptic longitude–latitude and Right Ascension–declination coordinates. Most of the stars studied hitherto (Pai & Shylaja 2016, 2019; Shylaja & Pai Curr Sci 2018a, 2018b, 2019) were all in the northern hemisphere. It may be recalled that the name of the zodiacal sign (Pai & Shylaja 2016) for a group includes stars with all declinations – both north and south. For example, the group of Mesa includes the stars of Andromeda. The only two southern stars that were mentioned in the group of Gemini are Sirius and Canopus. Here, we study the stars grouped under Libra and Scorpio, which includes bright stars in the southern hemisphere. Theconfusion about the Dhruvaka (east–west coordinates) is discussed.

R VENKETESWARA PAI¹ B S SHYLAJA²

1. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune 411 008, India.
2. Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, High Grounds, Bengaluru 560 001, India.

Published

30 July 2020

Manuscript received

8 March 2020

Accepted

26 May 2020

Final version published online

30 July 2020