I don’t understand how one night a guy looked at the stars and said that if you draw a line between certain stars you can see a lion. And also were they chosen at random?
In: Planetary Science
Humans have had every night for 10s of thousands of years to stare at the sky and wonder. Lots of time to pick out new shapes and tell their friends.
It’s only really on the last few hundred years that we have created this much light pollution that a large chunk of our population rarely even sees the stars.
[Pareidolia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia)
Humans are pattern finding animals.
Most people when looking at the stars would see some shapes. What shapes, which stars are grouped together and the interpretation varies from culture to culture. For example Chinese people traditionally divided the sky into different areas than in the Greco-Roman tradition, on which the modern astronomical names are based.
>And also were they chosen at random?
Yes. See a shape, give it a name. Easy.
I think the answer youre looking for is that there has been no pollution for thousands of years and every night those stars were very much in your face. Its impossible to look at something every day for decades and not find patterns. Even ones that are pretty hard to see. Remember those weird books of designs that make you squint your eyes to see a hidden image? They’re extremely hard to see at first, but the more you do it the easier it is to see.
Constellations are purely cultural inventions, different cultures have different constellations and different mythoses related to night sky. It’s just looking for bunnies in clouds, except with a static view. So if you find one “bunny” and show it to your friends, they can show it to their friends etc.
I think it is worth remembering that the stars which make up constellations may appear “adjacent” from our perspective, but remember they are overwhelmingly many many many lightyears further away or closer to us than eachother. Constellations aren’t some magic thing which “exist” in an objective sense – they are random collections of entirely unrelated stars which our brains (evolved to favour pattern-finding) associate and we decide to attribute names and meanings to.
You ever seen the night sky in a real dark place without light pollution? The brightest stars are like
brilliant lanterns in a dark sea. The imagination runs wild.
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Recently found myself in the Scottish Highlands when it all made sense to me. Never have I seen a sky anywhere near as clear as I did there, it looked like there were more stars than the sky could fit. The constellations, however, really stood out, even amongst this high and dense population. They were far brighter than their neighbours and it was clear to me what was what and was the first time I understood how people can look at the mess of stars and create and remember constellations.
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