Heavens Remember: Restoring the Celestial Sermon through Constellation Topography and the Great-Circle Method

Abstract

The Heavens Remember method paper (version 1.4) together with the star data its results are computed from. The method is a great-circle scan of the celestial sphere: for every admissible directed pair of stars a great-circle plane is constructed, and a third star is tested by cross-track angular deviation and forward position along the directed arc. The frozen baseline run tested 385,264 directed pairs and 230,680,184 stellar triples, admitted 375,294 geometric hits, and reduced to 18,427 unique constellation chains; 556 chains fall at or below 0.001 degrees of deviation, and 94 of those pass through three stars carrying proper names in the HYG catalogue. The deposit contains the paper, the BibTeX bibliography, the constellation antiquity register, the source-verification register, the full retained corpus and its star-level variants, the machine-readable numerical appendix, the star catalogue derived from HYG 4.1, and the scan and enrichment scripts. Mixed licence: paper text CC BY 4.0; research data CC BY-SA 4.0 (inherited from HYG Database 4.1 and Stellarium); scripts MIT. Constellation artwork, the full editorial corpus, and quoted primary text are deliberately excluded.