This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Andean Sky gathers three of the region's dark cloud constellations, animal figures read not from stars but from the black dust lanes of the Milky Way itself, ordered together as a working calendar.
Machacuay is the serpent, and the first of the animal series to rise; in the sequence recorded from the community of Misminay it appears before the toad, the tinamou, the llama and the fox, each marking a stage of the agricultural and herding year. The dark constellations are ordered as a set rather than scattered, and the order is the calendar; Spanish observers recorded the black patches as an object of native superstition without grasping that they were being shown a system, and the sequence was documented properly only in the twentieth century.
Yutu is the tinamou, a squat, poor-flying ground bird that crouches motionless rather than run, the behaviour the dark shape beside the toad and the serpent is read as showing, ahead of the llama in the same sequence.
Yacana is the llama, the largest of the dark cloud constellations. Two bright stars in Centaurus are its eyes, and a smaller dark shape beside it is read as its offspring. The Huarochiri manuscript, the one substantial religious text written in Quechua in the colonial period, says Yacana comes down at midnight to drink from a spring, that a man upon whom it descends will be fortunate, and that if it did not drink the world would flood; its rising and setting order through the year is tied to the herding calendar.