Star Stories with Ian Lauer

Orion is probably the most recognizable star pattern in the night sky. Rivaling the Pleiades, rivaling the Big Dipper. The story of Orion is considered to be one of the oldest stories in the world. At least, some parts of it. Some say it’s thousands of years old , others say maybe even a hundred thousand. It makes you wonder…what parts of the myth are new…and what parts have the essence of the ori...

Tonight, we’re not looking at a particular constellation or pattern in the sky. Tonight, we’re looking at the thing we see every day: the Sun. And I’m going to tell you a story about why it has to fight its way into the sky every single morning. This story comes from the Aztecs, who built one of the greatest empires in the history of the Americas. Their civilization centered on Tenochtitlan, where...

Tonight I’ll be telling a tale about a star in the sky that everyone has heard of. It’s not the biggest star, or the brightest. But for a long time, it was one of the most important stars in history. It’s a star called Polaris. Or as we know it as, the North Star. This story comes from a group whose ancestral lands span the high desert of the United States Southwest: the Paiute. They knew the land...

An ancient story from the Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes tells us that the stars of the Big Dipper is a memorial, written in the night sky for anyone willing to look up and listen. They saw an animal. A hunter, a father, a hero. They called him The Great Fisher. Not a fisherman with a rod and a line, but an animal. A fierce, weasel-like creature found in the forests of the Great Lakes. But...

Every culture in human history looked up at the same sky, and told stories about what they saw. Stories about Gods and Monsters, love and betrayal. Sacrifice and revenge. But those stories were more than entertainment. Encoded in them were things like calendars, star maps, even survival guides. Knowledge so important that the only way to protect it was to embed it inside a story. These are some of...