Cosmic happenstance and biological evolution come together to create a road map to the stars
Haitong Yu/Getty Images—you’ll be faced with an awesome sight: a night sky seemingly brimming with millions of stars, all shining down on you.in and around cities and suburbs, it feels like you’ve been dropped into the middle of a deep-space scene fromTrying to find your way around that starry vault can be a little overwhelming. There’s aof sky up there, and stars are everywhere. How can you possibly figure out where you’re looking?.
Cultures all over the world see these patterns in the stars, and nearly all assign them with stories and myths—not that all these stories are the same. For example, the ancient Greeks saw the constellation Pegasus as a flying horse, but in China it was part of a tortoise and in India a bed for the moon. Not bad for what’s essentially a big square of four stars with a few stellar lines arrayed off the corners.
Constellations therefore exist almost entirely in our perception, not as a physical reality. But they’re tremendously useful. For one thing, they offer an immediate idea of where an astronomical object is in the sky, similar to someone saying, “I live in a town in Virginia.” It’s not specific, but it does narrow the field considerably.
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