Thursday, February 26, 2009

more on constellations i general

A constellation is a group of stars that appear to have a physical proximity in the sky. The stars in a constellation are often vastly distant from each other, but they appear close to each other from the perspective of Earth. The word is used colloquially to refer to asterisms: groups of stars that appear to form patterns in the sky; different world cultures have divided the stars into different constellations. However, in modern astronomy the word refers instead to a method of dividing the sky into 88 areas with exact boundaries.

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