Star Patterns in the Sky
For thousands of years, people have looked up at the night sky and seen patterns in the stars. These patterns are called constellations. Ancient cultures gave them names based on animals, heroes, and objects they imagined seeing in the star patterns.
Constellations are like a giant connect-the-dots game in the sky! If you draw imaginary lines between certain bright stars, you can see shapes. Different cultures saw different shapes in the same stars — a group of stars that the Greeks called Orion the Hunter was seen as a canoe by some Native American tribes.
There are 88 officially recognized constellations that cover the entire sky. Some are easy to see, while others are faint and hard to spot.
Stars in a constellation might look close together from Earth, but they are actually at very different distances. Some might be 'only' 10 light-years away, while others are thousands of light-years away. They just happen to be in the same direction when viewed from our planet.
A light-year is the distance light travels in one year — about 5.88 TRILLION miles! Stars are incredibly far away.
**Think About It:** The stars you see tonight might look exactly the same as they did a thousand years ago to ancient stargazers. Stars move very slowly from our perspective because they are so incredibly far away.