The earth continues its progress through its orbit around the sun, and as it does so, it brings forward each star's rising time by about four minutes per night. This has the effect of bringing up all the constellations four minutes earlier each night, of course, and if you have been watching the sky each night at about the same time each evening, you will now notice a distinct change from the beginning of the summer.
The beautiful constellation of the Scorpion is now much further along each evening, and begins to bend down towards the western horizon much earlier each evening at the same time of night that it used to dominate the center of the southern sky (in the northern hemisphere). Similarly, the constellation of Orion is rising earlier each morning: it used to be rising just before sunrise, but now the first stars of Orion begin to break above the eastern horizon as early as 2 am at a latitude of about 35o north. By the end of September, the first stars of Orion will begin to rise at midnight at the same latitude.
As the sky in the early evening rotates westward, new constellations are now higher in the sky for an observer at 10 pm. One of these is the important landmark of the Great Square of Pegasus, shown above. The Great Square is fairly easy to locate if you can find the constellation of the Swan or Cygnus flying high in the night sky in the band of the Milky Way, and then looking down towards the horizon from Cygnus. To find the Milky Way, one of the easiest ways to begin is to go to the Scorpion again and follow the band of the Milky Way from its origin at the long curving stinger of the Scorpion (it rises between the Scorpion and Sagittarius and arcs across the summer sky, very distinctive and beautiful).
Another way to locate the Great Square of Pegasus is to find the North Star using the pointers on the Big Dipper. Circling the North Star on the other side of the Big Dipper is the "W" shape of the constellation Casseiopeia -- it is quite easy to locate. Using the star at one end of the "W" (the more upright end of the "W" of Casseiopeia, as opposed to the "lazier" side of the "W" which lies down more, as can be seen in the star chart below) you can draw an imaginary line from the North Star through the end of Casseiopeia's "W" and it will lead you right to the Great Square of Pegasus (see the diagram below).
The Great Square is in a part of the night sky that has fainter constellations, so it stands out quite plainly this time of year.
The square is flanked on either side by the constellation Pisces, which resembles two fish tied together by two long cords that are knotted and form a "V" shape -- see the diagram at the top of this post.
The stars of Pisces are very faint and much more difficult to make out than the stars of the Great Square of Pegasus. However, they are very important to ancient mythology found around the world, as discussed by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in Hamlet's Mill (all of which can now be read online for free at various places on the web, such as here or here, and their diagram of the same Great Square flanked by Pisces can be seen online here).
De Santillana and von Dechend tell us that in ancient Sumeria this astral square was referred to as "l-Iku" and figured prominently in mythology from some of the earliest texts we have from any culture. The authors of Hamlet's Mill explain its significance:
"l-Iku," the Pegasus-square (= alpha beta gamma Pegasi, alpha Andromedae) is, indeed, of the utmost importance, l-Iku representing the fundamental field measure, and Ungnad (Das wiedergefundene Paradies [1923], p. 11) understood the constellation, enclosed by Pisces, for the "Paradise," the primordial field, so to speak. More important, Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh (GE 11.57) about his ark, which was, like the apsu, an exact cube: "One iku was its floor space." (Before, 11.31, Ea had ordered Utnapishtim: "Like the apsu thou shalt ceil her.") Remembering what we heard above: "Since the ark disappeared there was a stone in its place . . . which was called foundation stone," e.e., Eben Shetiyyah, that covered the abyss, this cubic ark, the floor space of which was one iku, cannot be without interest for us, the less so, when the gods "raised high the head of Esagila (= l-Iku) equaling Apsu." 435 (Appendix 39).Thus, the Great Square enclosed by Pisces appears to represent both the Paradise field and also the ark (Utnapishtim is the Sumerian / Babylonian Noah).
Together with the Great Square, the two fish form an important motif in art from around the world. The square is often depicted as a gameboard, with two fish on either side. It is interesting that in Norse mythology the Aesir gods are often described playing chess in the paradisical field, using golden chessmen -- this probably refers to the same important square.
Note how often the artistic pattern of a square -- either depicted as a gameboard or as a square or parallelogram with cross-hatching reminiscent of a chess- or checkerboard -- appears in art from around the world, accompanied by two fish, or one creature with two fish-tails, or even two turtles arranged in similar angles to the fish of Pisces, their intersecting bodies cross-hatched like a chessboard. You can see them for yourself in the following images shown in Hamlet's Mill: (set one, set two, set three).
Note that the images above are all very similar -- two water creatures and a square "gameboard" pattern being common to each -- and yet some are from ancient Egypt, some are from Africa, one is from Sumatra in Indonesia, and one is from the New World. This recurrence is remarkable, and cannot be simply wished away by isolationists (who do not believe in ancient contact across the oceans between cultures) or put down to some kind of "collective unconscious."
Isolationists must fall back on the explanation that somehow the stars of the Great Square and the surrounding stars of Pisces are interpreted the same way by cultures that never came into contact with one another at all.
This explanation is ridiculous to anyone who goes out and looks at the stars for himself -- while the square would probably suggest itself to anyone from nearly any culture, there is nothing about it that inherently suggests a chessboard or a gameboard. Still less is it obvious that the very faint and hard to find (even if you are looking for them) stars around the Great Square should be interpreted as two fish. That they should be interpreted independently as two fish and a gameboard by cultures from ancient Egypt to the Americas stretches credulity beyond its breaking point.
Such theories would not even be proposed except for the flat refusal of the guardians of conventional theory to admit the possibility of very advanced ancient human achievement (even in the face of quite extensive evidence).
The case of the Great Square of Pegasus is just one more clear piece of evidence in a pile that includes many other powerful clues (see here and here, for example) that there was ancient contact across the seas long before conventional history admits was possible.
