Australian Sky & Telescope

How did we get the constellations?

EVER SINCE THE DAWN of time, we've looked up into the night sky and imagined stories in the patterns of the stars.

The concept of , arbitrary groupings of stars that represent familiar shapes, dates back more than 4,000 years to the ancient Sumerians. The Babylonians took the pictorial concept one step further and listed stars in what might be the first ever astronomical catalog, the MUL.APIN. Surviving copies of this compendium date to

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