![]() It's really just people drawing shapes in the sky and connecting the dots, but in reality the stars are not related. ![]() What we see as constellations from Earth, or groups of stars that appear to move together through the sky, just happen to be a bunch of stars that are all in roughly the same direction, but they might actually be huge distances apart from each other. I'm just going to point out that star clusters are not the same thing as constellations. To return to the Pleiades star cluster, the group is known as Matariki in Maori culture and signifies the return of the New Year. There are other cultures that place different significance on different groups of stars. It's also important to remember that the constellations that most Western people are familiar with are only the star patterns that were drawn by a single culture. It's known as the Seven Sisters, even though there are actually a lot more stars in the cluster, but seven is about what most people can see with the naked eye. ![]() (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA) Globular clusters. The Pleiades, for example, is an open star cluster and is often seen as a constellation in itself (even though it's also considered to be a part of Taurus). Globular cluster Messier 22, also known as M22, lies 10,000 light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius. The two types are open (formerly called galactic) clusters and globular clusters. I vaguely remember going out at night with my dad when I was a kid and looking for planets and star clusters with a telescope, but it was so long ago, the only star cluster I can remember finding was one called the Jewel Box, which I think I just remember because of the pretty name.ĭecember 11, - That's true for a lot of constellations, but not for all of them. star cluster, either of two general types of stellar assemblages held together by the mutual gravitational attraction of its members, which are physically related through common origin. I didn't realize that the Pleiades was a star cluster.
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