The stars in the Big Dipper and Little Dipper help navigators locate the North Star. Following the five stars in the Five Star Trail—the municipalities of Hempfield Township, Youngwood, South Greensburg, Southwest Greensburg, and Greensburg—takes travelers on a more northeastern tack. All five towns in the constellation partnered to create the nearly 7.8-mile trail southeast of Pittsburgh.
Following the concept of the Five Star trail these caches will be named for different constellations.
Grus constellation lies in the southern sky. Its name means “the crane” in Latin.
The stars of Grus were once part of the constellation Piscis Austrinus. It was the Dutch astronomer Petrus Plancius who created the constellation Grus from the observations of the Dutch navigators Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman in the late 16th century.
The constellation first appeared in a celestial atlas in 1603, in Johann Bayer’s Uranometria. In the early 17th century, it briefly went by an alternative name, Phoenicopterus, which means “the flamingo” in Latin.
There are no myths associated with the constellation. Grus was one of the 12 constellations created by Dutch explorers in the late 16th century. The only connection the crane has with mythology lies in the fact that it was a sacred bird to the god Hermes.
The constellation was created from stars located to the south of the constellation Piscis Austrinus. The brightest star in Grus is called Alnair, which means “the bright one from the fish’s tail” in Arabic. Similarly, the proper name of Gamma Gruis, Al Dhanab, also means “the tail” in Arabic.