Zodiac constellations can be traced even further back, to Bronze Age (First Babylonian dynasty) sources, including Gemini "The Twins", from MAŠ.TAB.BA.GAL.GAL "The Great Twins", and Cancer "The Crab", from AL.LUL "The Crayfish", among others. Around the end of the 5th century BC, Babylonian astronomers divided the ecliptic into twelve equal "signs", by analogy to twelve schematic months of thirty days each. Each sign contained thirty degrees of celestial longitude, thus creating the first known celestial coordinate system. Unlike modern astronomers, who place the beginning of the sign of Aries at the place of the Sun at the vernal equinox; Babylonian astronomers
Across the Zodiac some remote place on their planet.) The book's narrator names his spacecraft the "Astronaut". The book contains what was probably the first alien language in any work of fiction. The same title was used for a later, similar book—"Across the Zodiac: A Story of Adventure" (1896) by Edwin Pallander (1869–1952) (the pseudonym of UK biologist, botanist and author Lancelot Francis Sanderson Bayly). Pallander copied some elements of Greg's plot; in his book, gravity is negated by a gyroscope. Across the Zodiac Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record (1880) is a science fiction novel by Percy Greg, who