Why are constellations named in Latin?
Specifically, the Latin names of 48 constellations were recorded in the 2nd century of the Christian era by Claudius Ptolemy [after A.D. 83-c. 168]. Many of the names were translations from the original Greek. For the Latin and Greek civilizations shared the same gods, and the same mythology. So their astronomers mapped and organized the night skies with these beliefs in mind. They identified over 1,000 stars. A way of finding these stars night after night was connecting them into imagined figures. These figures could be memory aids to history, such as Heracles and Theseus as founders of two out of the three tribes that formed ancient Greece. Or they could be memory aids to the exploits of the gods, such as Ursa Major being the fate of Callisto aka Kallisto, the great love of Jupiter aka Zeus.
