- Star Tales - Eridanus (ianridpath.com)
Aratus applied the mythical name Ἠριδανός (Eridanos) to this constellation although many other authorities, including Ptolemy in the Almagest, simply called it Ποταμός (Potamos), meaning river. Eratosthenes had another identification: he said that the constellation represented the Nile, ‘the only river which runs from south to north’. Hyginus agreed, claiming that the star Canopus lay at the end of the celestial river, in the same way that the island Canopus lies at the mouth of the Nile. However, in this he was wrong, for Canopus marks a steering oar of the ship Argo and is not part of the river. Hyginus had evidently misunderstood a comment by Eratosthenes, who had simply said that Canopus lay ‘beneath’ the river, meaning that it was at a more southerly declination.
- Mecca (Wikipedia)
Mecca (/ˈmɛkə/; officially Makkah al-Mukarramah, commonly shortened to Makkah) is the capital of Mecca Province in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia and the holiest city according to Islam. It is 70 km (43 mi) inland from Jeddah on the Red Sea, in a narrow valley 277 m (909 ft) above sea level. Its last recorded population was 2,385,509 in 2022. Its metropolitan population in 2022 was 2.4 million, making it the third-most populated city in Saudi Arabia after Riyadh and Jeddah. Around 44.5% of the population are Saudi citizens and around 55.5% are foreigners from other Muslim countries. Pilgrims more than triple the population number every year during the Ḥajj pilgrimage, observed in the twelfth Hijri month of Dhūl-Ḥijjah. With over 10.8 million international visitors in 2023, Mecca was one of the ten most visited cities in the world.