The All Stars Encyclopaedia (ASE) is a collaborative digital initiative dedicated to preserving and sharing the world’s diverse cultural knowledge of stars and constellations from ancient, indigenous, and living traditions. In this talk, I explore the significance of sky culture as a vital archive of cultural memory, highlighting the need for plurality and inclusivity in astronomy, and demonstrate how the ASE addresses these needs through its scholarly, wiki-style infrastructure and integration with visual sky mapping platforms like Stellarium. This presentation outlines the structure and content of the ASE, presents an example entry from Mesopotamian tradition, and further discusses the project’s potential for research and education while inviting engagement from scholars to expand its coverage across time and space.

At first glance it might seem that a comparative study of Ancient Babylonian ideas about the Moon and those of the Gwich'in First Nation of today's Arctic Canada and Alaska might be less than useful. This study will show how one informs on the other, offering a window into the way that both cultures, one from the ancient past and the other the modern present, help us understand how we as humans share common insights into the sky above us regardless of time or place.

Indonesia is an archipelago country with approximately 17,000 islands in Southeast Asia. Each island has different ethnicities and cultures. One of the Indonesian islands that is famous in the eyes of foreign countries is Bali. Bali, with a majority Hindu population, loves to interpret nature in general, and the sky in particular, for carrying out activities, both rituals and daily. With these cultural practices, the Balinese created their traditional calendar. Their sky culture is called "Palelintangan" and preserved in manuscripts and some artifacts. Each part of Palelintangan is connected to stars (lintang), God (Dewa/Wayang) and animals (Sato). Palelintangan is written in lontar (dried leaves of Borassus flabellifer or palmyra) and also in cloth. In Palelintangan, there are thirty five panels connected to Sapta wara (seven days) and Panca wara (five days).

The talk will give an overview about this specific Indonesian sky culture and its digital reconstruction with its own software tool (to be released within 2025 for broader application together with the popular Stellarium desktop planetarium).

This report is divided into three parts. First, I will provide a brief overview of the development of Chinese constellations prior to Chen Zhuo, and how he created a new system based on different constellation systems. Secondly, I will introduce my work on the reconstruction of the early Chen Zhuo constellations, which is based on a combination of newly discovered early star catalogs, and early constellation texts and star maps that have not been fully emphasized by previous researchers, aiming to make accurate reconstructions. Finally, I will discuss the transformations of the Chen Zhuo's constellations over more than a thousand years and reasons behind these transformations.

The oldest astronomical compendium, the Babylonian MUL.APIN, in its first list provides a catalogue of asterisms associated with deities. This list is subdivided into paths of the three main gods of the Babylonian pantheon in the early second millennium BCE, among which the first again shows a subdivision into the Standing and the Sitting Gods of the Ekur Temple, the highest Babylonian sacred place. The four Sitting Gods occupy the space of the circumpolar area, and may refer to the four sections between the four cardinal points of the year (equinoxes and solstices). The ten Standing Gods represent ten units of the fertile agricultural year in Mesopotamia. Supplemented by two further deities with their respective court, who represent the inhospitable winter, this circle in the ‘Path of the God Enlil’ depicts the annual cycle in the sky. This talk will explain that this function was later taken over by the "ideal calendar" preserved in other lists of MUL.APIN. Yet another half millennium later it was replaced by the schematic zodiac, which was taken over by the Greeks almost immediately after its invention, although it did not make sense in the Mediterranean climate (which actually contributed to the acceptance of more esoteric forms of ancient astrology).