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Foreword
It has long been known that the ancient Chinese were rather thorough astronomers. During an age when the European countries were providing little valuable information on events occurring in the heavens above, the Chinese were painstakingly monitoring the sky. Virtually everything they saw that was out of the ordinary was logged. But what really set the Chinese apart from their European counterparts was not just the vast number of accounts of comets, meteor showers, novae, and eclipses, but the details they documented for each event, such as dates and locations in the sky. The latter are of considerable significance.
European astronomers long ago adopted the constellations of the Greeks and, as they explored the world, these constellations became universal. But the Chinese remained mostly isolated and their astronomers adopted a different set of constellations. So, where the universally adopted constellations are 88 in number, the Chinese actually divided the sky up into 283 constellations. The Chinese constellations were also adopted by the Japanese and Koreans.