Covenant astronomy

The Covenant and its member cultures have rich astronomical traditions. Many of these date back to the pre-Covenant practices of the San'Shyuum and Sangheili. Some aspects of Covenant astronomy have even been inspired by newer member species such as the Lekgolo, some subcultures of which exhibit an interest in astronomy.

History
The beginnings of astronomical traditions in most of the Covenant member species' cultures are heavily intertwined with religion and myth. Notable exceptions to this are the Lekgolo and the Yanme'e; the former's beliefs in the supernatural are minimal, while quirks of the latter's psychology meant that they lacked a widespread tendency to associate the sky with the divine, though exceptions to this no doubt existed.

Sangheili
The Sangheili have rich astronomical traditions going back to their earliest days. As is common with Congruent species, the Sangheili had always associated the heavens with the divine, with early astronomy being heavily intertwined with religious practice. They made deities and mythic figures out of the several celestial bodies, the most prominent among them the primary sun-god, Urs. One interesting quirk of early Sangheili astronomy was that their cosmological models were more often Urs-centric, centered on their system's primary star as the center of the universe, rather than their homeworld as was common on Earth. This was no doubt due to the enduring influence of the Ursian faiths well into the Sangheili's advancement, even as the sun-religions were gradually supplanted by Forerunner worship as the Sangheili's understanding of the natural world grew. As science uncovered the nature of the stars and that of the Urs system merely as one of countless other similar objects in the heavens, the old ways of sun-worship inevitably became antiquated. For a time, some theological offshoots attempted to reconcile this seeming oddity by stating that the Urs-Fied-Joori system was exceptional in its divinity among all the stars in the universe, or that all stars were in fact gods ruling over their planetary systems (and, by extension, possible species living there). However, these splinter sects were doomed to fail with the rise of the more science-compatible Forerunner faiths, which had already been gaining ground on the global stage for some time. Though the local stars were no longer worshiped as literal deities by the advent of the postindustrial era, the mythology around them would remain a keystone of Sangheili culture for millennia to come.

Constellations
Like humanity, most of the Covenant species have identified stellar constellations in the skies of their homeworlds, though different cultures ascribe different meanings and variable amounts of importance to these star patterns. To the Sangheili, constellations were particularly important, and their cultural significance in the early days of their astronomy has remarkable parallels to humanity's own. Sanghelios constellations, too, usually identify stellar patterns as mythical or divine figures, objects or places. Constellations have endured as a key fixture of Sangheili astronomy and astronavigation as the species' knowledge of the heavens improved, and they are often used to identify spatial directions and astronomical features even today. Such traditions continued even as the species spread to other worlds, with many of the Sunlit Worlds in particular devising their own sets of constellations.

In contrast, though the early San'Shyuum had their own systems of constellations, they were mostly replaced by less fanciful ways of mapping the celestial sphere as the species' astronomy developed on Janjur Qom.

Covenant names for astronomical features
The majority of the Covenant names for astronomical features are of either Sangheili or San'Shyuum origin. There is a relatively even split in which names predominate in the modern Covenant, though Sangheili names are more common particularly in the spinward side of the Holy Ecumene due to the ancient Sangheili's well-developed astronomy.